Stitches that snitched: Espionage Knitting
You’ve dropped a stitch. You’ve accidentally messed up your ribbing and put a purl stitch where a knit stitch should’ve gone. Found a knot in your working yarn? Been there.
But what if those “mistakes” weren’t mistakes at all? What if that dropped stitch or odd knot were subtly crafted into a code meant for someone on the other side of the war?
If we time travel back to the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, knitting wasn’t just a pastime. It was a form of espionage. Devoid of artillery and heavy machinery, women were encouraged to knit garments for soldiers. The weapons they wielded were instead pocket-sized needles, passing on secret messages to allies.
Like zeroes and ones in modern computing, K (knit) and P (purl) stitches formed a kind of binary code. Messages were hidden using Morse code, strategically dropped stitches, or loop knots that could later be decoded. Sometimes, the entire garment would be unraveled to reveal the secret message within.
This hidden-message method falls under steganography, the art of concealing information inside something ordinary, like embedding a message in an image, file, or in this case, an unsuspecting knit pattern.
There are records of women doing this as early as World War I, especially in Belgium, where older women would sit by their windows knitting as they watched the trains go by. They’d track Imperial Germany’s train movements and encode the details into their knitting. If you’ve ever associated knitting with older women, this stereotype was partially born from this group of women. Who knew they were taking down the bad guys stitch by stitch? Badass.
By the time World War II came around, authorities had caught on. The Belgian Office of Censorship cracked down on the distribution of knitting patterns, fearing that secret codes were being passed along through yarn and pattern instructions. Little did they know the that some methods had irregularities that couldn’t be decoded simply by looking at the pattern.
One of the most remarkable figures from this time was Phyllis Latour Doyle, a British spy whose knitting quite literally saved lives. She carried about 2,000 codes on a piece of silk hidden in her hair, marking each used one with a pinprick. She wrapped the silk around a knitting needle, tucked it into a shoelace, and used it as a hair tie. Despite being interrogated by German officers, she was never discovered. She also lived to 102. Kicking Nazi ass kept her young.
I don’t like to drone on, but if you’re interested in further reading, there’s a 1942 manual titled A Guide to Codes and Signals that referenced how fiber arts could be used to encode wartime messages. You can read it here: A Guide to Codes and Signals (Scribd). If you want to dive deeper into the history of knitting as espionage, this article is a great rabbit hole: Double O Seven Stitches Per Inch: Knitting Spies – Modern Daily Knitting.
