To Knit, Or Not to Knit?

July for Lincoln WI was a talk about codes in knitting, not how to decode knitting patterns, but how knitting, or other crafts, can contain secret messages. Local textile artist Polly Lancaster, brought her knitting machine as well as her scarves, millinery and other artwork. Polly spoke about having an emotional connection with clothing, and how she tried to imbue her artwork with this. 

She displayed “Doing Bird” which was a white bird with a tear embroidered by its eye and a highly decorative cross on its neck, the bird sat in a Perspex box on shredded paper. This had been inspired by prisoners in El Salvador, who had been stripped to their underwear and shorn of hair and all looked the same apart from their prison tattoos. The shredded paper had human rights law printed on it.

There were also Insects as Information, and two beautifully embroidered insects, a blue bottle signifying the person who creates a lot of noise, but doesn’t produce much, a spider for patience and the hornet for senior management. 

But the pieces we were really interested in were Polly’s knitting. Where, in a project called Coding the Bard, she had translated Shakespeare, Bowie or anything she fancied into binary code and fed this through her knitting machine with the zeros and ones represented by different colours. This can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, when punched cards were used to control looms and automate textile manufacturing and also used by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to feed information into the analytical engine. Lincolnshire mathematician George Boole (his statue is outside Lincoln railway station) also got a mention.

Polly informed us she wasn’t the first to incorporate secret messages into textiles and Bletchley Park has a sampler, by Major Alexis Casdagli, that has “God Save the King” and “F**k Hitler” in morse code in the border. Which raised a lot of laughs. 

Finally, Polly had sent Sir Ian McKellen one of her pieces of art in the form of a knitted scarf that incorporated “This above all: to thine own self be true” from Hamlet in it, she received a letter of thanks, but has yet to see him wear it.