(This post is a companion to my YouTube video “Knitting: The Original Secret Weapon (and nobody noticed)“ Video embedded below. Grab your project.)
If you’ve ever looked at the news and thought “there is nothing I can do” — this one’s for you.
While governments built weapons and surveillance systems, some women resisted differently. They sat by windows, on trains, in cafés. Quietly, they used knitting spy codes as a form of resistance. This isn’t a metaphor; it’s a verified part of our history. And those same stitches have something real to say about your nervous system and mental health right now.
Knits, Purls, and Binary Code
Here’s the nerdy foundation: every knit stitch is one type of loop, and every purl is the opposite. If you call knits “0” and purls “1,” you’re writing binary code in wool.
During WWII, resistance groups turned these stitches into a weapon. Women assigned meaning to specific patterns. Knit represented freight cars, purl signified troops, and yarn over symbolized artillery. Through this method, they could encode troop movement data into the fabric itself. These knitting spy codes allowed them to carry intelligence in plain sight. They were essentially running a low-tech program on their needles while appearing to do nothing more than make cozy socks.
Invisibility as a Weapon
The success of these knitting spy codes relied on a single, powerful assumption. People believed that a woman with needlework is harmless background noise.
Molly “Old Mom” Rinker, during the American Revolution, sat in an elevated position “just knitting” while watching British troop movements. She’d conceal intelligence in yarn balls and drop them to Continental soldiers below. To British officers, she was just clutter in the landscape. To the resistance, she was a critical node in an information network. When the world refuses to see your power, the blind spot becomes your shield.
The Project Bag as Smuggling Gear
Phyllis Latour Doyle, a spy in occupied France, used silk wrapped around a knitting needle to hide her messages. Even after being strip-searched by Nazi soldiers, her secrets remained safe.
Similarly, Elizabeth Bentley used her knitting bag to transport microfilm containing B-29 bomber plans. Outside: yarn and patterns. Inside: state secrets. If you’ve ever lost a stitch marker at the bottom of your bag, you understand why this worked. Cultural stereotypes and “crafty” chaos merged to create the perfect smuggling system.
Modern Craftivism: Your Quiet Resistance
We may not be hiding microfilm anymore, but the spirit of knitting spy codes lives on in modern “craftivism.” The Revolutionary Knitting Circle influences us today. Collective art projects knit corporate critiques into sweaters. We are still using yarn to reclaim public space.
To a surveillance system, a handmade garment registers as background. To the person wearing it, it can be a scarf. Every stripe signifies a statistic. Or it can be a shawl encoded with a name or a prayer. It is a way of saying: “I do not consent to this world as-is.”
Your Knitting, Right Now
Those WWII resistance knitters couldn’t stop a war alone, but they refused to be useless.
“I have yarn. I have eyes. I have time. I will use what I have.”
If you knit to manage anxiety, that is also a form of resistance. Knitting helps you stay in your body when your brain wants to leave. The world says keep producing, keep working, and don’t break down. By choosing to make something “unproductive” and soft, you are prioritizing your nervous system.
That scarf you knit on the bad-brain days? It’s a code. It says: I was not okay, but I stayed. You’re not just killing time; you’re stitching back a small piece of control in a world that feels too big. That has always been what the needles were for.
Tell me in the comments: if your knitting had a secret code right now, what would it say?