Properly Practised, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and doesn`t hurt the
untroubled spirit,either. By Elizabeth Zimmerman
REAL KNITTING
The word knitting comes from the Old English cnyttan,meaning `to knot`.
What we now call knitting-making a textile by looping yarn using two needles-
isn`t much older than 1.000 years and it wasn`t until the Renaissance that
wool was used rather than silk or cotton.
The verb `to knit` isn`t recorded in English unti 1400.
The earliest fragments of apparently knitted material were excavated at the
fort of Dura-Europos in Syria in 1935 and date from 265AD, there are also socks
from Coptic Egypt dating to the 4th century AD, but all these are made using
a technique known as `nalebinding` which only uses one needle.
KNITTING CODES
During the Second World War the Office of Censorship banned people from
posting knitting patterns abroad in case they contained coded messaages.
There was many occasions when knitting was used for code.
The Belgian resistance recruited old women whose windows overlooked
railway yards to note the trains in their knitting,basically the women would
purl a stich if a artillery train went by and drop a stitch for troop train.
The most favourite example of knitting being used to record information
is Madame Defarge in Dicken`s A Tale Of Two Cities,she sits by the
guillotine as the enemies of the French Revolution are beheaded, calmly
recording their names n wool as their heads fall into the basket,although
there is no evidence tricoteuses-knitting women, exsisted in that time
of history.
Morse code messages could also be sent in a morse code form by
knitting it into a simple gament like a scarf, knitting a purl stitch for
`a dot`and a knit stitch for `dash`
During the war some coutries instituted what might on the surface
appear to be a series of seemingly bizarre resstrictions, the following
were among banned items: the international mailing of postal chess
games,crossword puzzles.newspaper clipping and knitted instuctions,
lovers `X`s and `O`s, etc all of which could serve as a communication
for spies.