#knitting code

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Knitting Is Coding’ And Yarn Is Programmable In This Physics Lab – By Siobhan Roberts – Preschool of the Arts New York City

[professorpski]

The woman sitting with her knitting in her hands, her eyes following the stitches with quiet glance was as unlike his idea of a successful detective as could be found... But he had been told she could produce the goods....

Yes, knitting in mysteries is not unknown. Think if Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple, the old woman with a nose of murder who knits quietly in order to not be notice, or who goes to match a skein at the local shop in order to find out the village gossip. Miss Marple was an amateur while Millicent Newberry, the heroine of The Mysterious Office by Jennette Lee in 1922.

And Ms. Newberry is taking notes on the case by knitting. Shades of Madame Defarge! She knitted in Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities to keep a list of the aristocrats whom she wanted executed during the French Revolution. I am not sure how Newberry could do take lots of accurate notes  while knitting unless she was a speed demon, although you can see how a code of knits and purls would work very like the 0 and 1 of computer coding. Knitting coding, in effect.

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[hellobeautifuldigitalworld]

Code, beautiful code…

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[hellobeautifuldigitalworld]

“Whether women knitted codes into fabric or used stereotypes of knitting women as a cover, there’s a history between knitting and espionage. “Spies have been known to work code messages into knitting, embroidery, hooked rugs, etc,” according to the 1942 book A Guide to Codes and Signals. During wartime, where there were knitters, there were often spies; a pair of eyes, watching between the click of two needles.”

The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool

Grandma was just making a sweater. Or was she?

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