Wool roving heart
Here’s a wool roving heart and my first attempt at using code in my knitting. This sample uses Madame Defarge’s Knitting Cipher. Defarge was a character, a tricoteur, in Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities.
A combination of stitches can be used as a code, encasing meaning within the stitchwork.
There are different methods for using code in knitting. Other ways might be Morse code, or a simple letter and number (related to position) in the alphabet combination. Or you could make up your own. I can see where colourwork could contain messages too! The possibilities are probably endless.
In the case of the wool heart, I used Defarge’s cipher. Stitch combinations are used to represent letters of the alphabet: in this sample, the word LOVE.
I knit from the bottom up, stitching in a ‘letter’ on 4 rows. The purls and one twist sort of give it away and interestingly, the letter stitches look like mistakes in the knitting.
The next one I make I’m going to knit a word or two into one row only and see how that ‘reads’. I’ll probably have to knit the words from last letter to first as I’d want the finished word to read from left to right. Just a thought.
