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Craft History: Knitting Espionage

Knot Your Grandma's Knitting...or Is It?

November 4, 2024

What do espionage, Charles Dickens, and knitting have in common?

Intelligence operatives, aka spies, use encoded messages to transmit information. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens created a character named Madame DeFarge who used her knitting to send such messages during the French Revolution. Knitting espionage turns out to be a real thing! Some historians believe that Dickens based Mme. DeFarge’s character on an 18th century political activist, Olympia de Gouges.

 

Why is knitting useful in espionage? Think of knitting’s basic stitches, knits and purls, as Morse code or binary numbering. If you know how to combine dots and dashes or zeroes and ones to encode a message, you can use knits and purls to do the same thing. Encoded messages are simply information created using specific patterns, and what is knitting except stitched patterns of knits, purls and their variations?

 

Knitting seems like such an innocuous activity, but women like Phyllis Latour Doyle, a 23-year old British agent working in France, helped win World War II by sending messages encoded in their knitting. Her work was finally declassified in 2014 and she received France’s Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her efforts. Doyle died in 2023 at the age of 102. Can you imagine being one of her grand- or great grandchildren and learning about her knitting espionage?

 

 

Spies also sent messages enclosed in balls of yarn or in knotted yarn. Molly “Old Mom” Rinker was a Philadelphia innkeeper who sent information in this way to George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

 

While the information we could find on crafty espionage talks about knitting stitches, you can also encode messages using crochet stitches, color work or needle arts. There’s even a website, knitwitter, that will help you create crochet and knit patterns using binary code. Given how well knitting works with coding, is anyone surprised that some computer scientists see knitting as a way of reinforcing learning about digital technology?


 Caryn & the Yarnivore Crew

 Coming Attractions!

 Black Friday!! Zorn Junction Yarn Co, Saturday, November 29 11a-4p
 Bad Frog Yarn Co, Saturday, December 7 11a-4p
 Savvy Skeins, December 21 11a-4p

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