Inspired by Carolyn knitting another decoder hat like the one she made me, I’ve put together a little web app which lets you turn a message into a knitting pattern ready to be decoded by your geek friend! The instructions in the pattern for how to encode the message are quite involved, and I figured the whole process would be much easier if the computer helped out a bit more – after all, what knows codes better than a computer?

Various people have done something similar, often referring to the old essay HEX and BIN meet my friends Knit & Purl (which I had to recover from the Wayback machine!), but I haven’t seen anything that goes quite as far as this.

• The web app: ASCII Knitting

Enjoy – and share it around if you find it useful!