Tools and Resources: Binary Knitting

This article curteosy of Joe Klinkhoff.

HEX and BIN  meet my Friends Knit & Purl

Introduction

Prompted by a recent posting in the knitlist about how some knitters like to "sign" their garments by adding their names in a single line of knitting as morse code (two color knitting).  The question was asked -- could it be done in binary.  The answer is yes as either two color knitting or combinations of knit and purl stitches.

Binary and Hexadecimal

Our everyday number system is called Decimal and is base 10.  We count from 0 to 10 and then start over but increasing the ordinal number: 9 goes to 10 (ordinal increased by 1 in the tens spot and the 1's place re-sets to the beginning of the set = 0).  There are as many number systems as there are numbers, but many don't make sense to use.

The other non-base 10 system you are used to is Time.  It uses divisions of 60.  60 seconds is one minute, 60 minutes is one hour.  Two other heavily used bases are base 2 commonly known as binary and base 16 commonly known as hexadecimal.  These two bases are used by computers because they interchange well and fit the machine architecture. 

Everything in a computer is stored as 0's and 1's which is binary.  Each 1 or 0 is called a bit.  8 bits make a byte. 1 byte is a character (letter space number on the keyboard).  Since computers are world wide gadgets there are many alphabets and symbologies in use so they needed a really easy way to represent each character in the world. 

So along comes hexidecimal.  Base 16 uses the "numbers" 0 - F.  The complete set of digits is as follows 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.  So 9 does not go to 10 but to A.  F goes to 10.  Each digit represents 8 bits or 1 byte.  Each character in the world has been given 4 bytes (16 bits) to be able to be represented.  The nice thing is that they convert "inline".  This means that if you line up 4 hexadecimal digits (HEX from here on out) and convert to their binary counterparts it is lined up exactly as it would appear in a computers memory.

EXAMPLE: the hex digit F is 1111 in binary and the hex digit 2 is 0010 so if we would take the combined hex number of F2 and convert to binary we just push their values together: 1111 + 0010 = 11110010 (8 bits).

What does this have to do with Knitting?

Well, it is  real easy to see that the ones and zeros in a binary number easily convert to either knit and purl stitches or two colors of knit (or purl) stitches.  So we can take names, quotes or any text and convert then to binary and work them into our knitting projects.  Zi will cover the conversion into a knit/purl pattern

Thanks for the Knit /Purl Idea

Andrea Whiteside heras_mom@citlink.net

The basic process

The basic process is as follows:

1. Write your phrase or Name exactly as you want it -- Upper and lower case count.

2. Convert each character in you phrase or name to hex

3. Convert the hex to binary

4. Use the binary as a Guide to either use two colors or knit and purl stitches to work it into a single line of your project.

Remember

Each character in your phrase/name will require 8 stitches (assumes English, standard alphabet.  Other languages could take up to 16 stitches per letter).

The Actual Process

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