Morse Code is a system of representing text characters with dots (short duration signals) and dashes (signals three times longer in duration). Twenty-six letters and ten digits are shown in the table above. There are also tables which include some non-English letters and some punctuation.
My father was a signalman in the Navy and later worked for the railroad where his job included, among other things, sending telegraph messages. He told me that each person has their own way of sending, called the person’s “hand” and that they were as distinct as individual voices. He could tell who was sending the messages just by listening to them. He would occasionally try to teach me the code but all I remember is SOS.
While doing a little research on the code, I can across a nice website for learning it. It even has audio files that you can listen to. If you don’t want to click on the link (not an unreasonable precaution) it is http://www.learnmorsecode.com
Messages can be transmitted using light flashes, sound taps, carrier waves of various types, and as it turns out … fiber art. Knitting, weaving, crochet, hooked rug, embroidery all lend themselves to patterns which could contain messages.
Here are a few rules about the duration (width) of dots, dashes, spacing:
- dashes are three times as wide as dots
- the space between the part of a single letter are equal to one dot
- the space between letters equals 3 dots
- the space between words equals 7 dots
I made this scarf a few weeks ago and when I decided to write this post I couldn’t remember if the code was in the black or gold rows!
Gold .._ _. . _. . _. . (decoded = unenene)
Black .. _ _ _ ._ _ ._ (decoded = iowa) By the way U of Iowa colors are black and gold.
The black and gold scarf was made for an adult on a 8-dent heddle. There were only four letters so there were enough warp threads to make the unit dot two threads wide. Dashes and spaces were two or six threads wide. The stripes showed up very well.
When I tried to make a child size scarf for a young friend whose name had six letter, I had to reduce the unit dot size to one thread. It looked pretty good when I warped the loom, the pattern was obvious. But when I started weaving, the plain weave pattern meant that there was a shift in adjacent rows. It looks odd close up, like there are some squares in the pattern. But if you back up it looks better.
Perhaps next I will weave some scarves with mischievous messages. 🙂
As always, your polite and helpful comments are welcome.
Knitting, Weaving, Writing 