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Secret messages in cloth

July 8, 2008 in design, knitting by Sarah

When I was a child, one of my favourite stories involved a prince who fell in love with a commoner who would not marry him until he had a trade, so he learned to weave cloth. They ruled for several years, but he didn’t know how people really lived in his country, so he dressed as a poor man and went out into the city to see for himself.

He was taken by a group of priests to a cave and forced to work with others as slaves. He found an old friend in the cave and together they made a very precious piece of cloth that would only be suitable for the queen, and in it he wove the story of his capture and where he and the others were being held.

This was done in such a cunning way that the priests would not be able to understand the message, but the queen would. Whereupon she rescued everyone.

This story mesmerized me — I loved the idea of a message in the cloth, and I was thinking of how to do something like that myself.

This is my scarf with a secret message in progress:

So far the message is really secret as you can’t see the way I have rendered Morse code into the stitch pattern, but I will be more explicit and post symbol charts for this particular rendering in a few days.

I will now leave you with a final picture and a note: it is an Armenian story called Anaeet.

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Please leave a comment or email me at sarah (at) parallaxknitting (dot) com, you can also read about my cooking adventures at Bounded in a Nutshell

My patterns

A glove by any other name

Gloves can be deceiving

Josephine

Lyra’s cap

Lyra's coat

Minimalist funnel neck

Morse code vest

Pink leafy scarf

Russian princess in exile

Slouch hat

Urban rustic gloves

West wind gloves

wwg

Wisp

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July 12, 2008 at 5:04 am

teachinlupie

I found your blog while looking for Debbie New info. I love your Lyra’s coat , Josephine and so many others. I will be passing on your patterns to our knitting club and am sure many will be making them.