My hat contains a hidden message
17 Mar 2024I shaved my head.
My hair’s been getting thinner for a while now, so I thought I’d try going all in.
I’m still getting used to it.
But one thing I did expect, was that my head would feel colder now. So I needed a hat.
I looked over my save crochet patterns and found this one - Widcombe C2C crochet hat
It uses a crochet technique called ‘corner-to-corner’ (c2c) - effectively the fabric is made up of squares, worked in diagonal rows.
The design as written is okay, but a little generic. I wanted something more meaningful.
The c2c effectively gives us a grid, and in the original design the middle band is a repeating pattern of 6x10 square blocks.
So the question was, what could I do with this?
Well a row of 6 squares gives us 6 bits, allowing us to represent 64 values - more than enough to encode characters of the (latin) alphabet.
Meanwhile we have 10 rows, and it just so happens that my name contains 10 letters - CHRIS OATES
In fact, we only need 5 bits to represent the alphabet, so we have one spare. I considered leaving it blank, or using it to represent uppercase/lowercase. But none of those looked very good, so I just used repeating blocks of 5x10.
The complete design looks like this
And here’s the completed hat
Following the pattern diagonally was… fun.
But at least my head isn’t cold anymore.
Chris.