Saddles & Stitches

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110200-knitting-doom/

(...I really don't want to hunt that up typo just now. I'll fix it when I fix it. The Tose Lace Kitting Book, indeed.)

Which is beyond the point. The point is, the patterns are live! Go forth and knit pretty laces!

It was an eye-popping magenta purple

HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey ...

...which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.

(This dress is labeled "mauve" as it is the color the above becomes after fading).

They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.

Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.

And it was actually quite fade-resistant! Much moreso than natural dyes. People in the 1920s would have known about their grandmothers' super bright colors, because those dresses were still folded up in the attic or still in scraps in patchwork quilts, and their grannies were right there to tell them (just like my 2020s niece recently tried on some 1960s dresses that belongd to my mom). And the word magenta has kept its meaning, even though it was also an aniline dye of the same era (and might be the dye in that first dress, aka fuchsine). So I don't know why the word mauve came to mean a muddy pale color, but I don't think it's because later generations were ignorant about historic dye colors. Apparently the color name "mauve taupe" was first used in 1925 for a muddy purple, so maybe that was the start of the shift.

PS, mauve is named for the French word for the mallow flower (probably this one, Malva sylvestris). I love it.

This is a fascinating addition that gives it way more context. I wish I had known it when I made the OP, especially given the views it's been getting.

Now I wonder if people in the 1920s thought mauve was that washed out grey-violet because of the fugitive nature of printer's inks?

Or maybe it was just one of those things.

George Leonnec

The Ride

Source One is Burchard of Worms' Decretum, Book XIX. The Decretum was a collection of canon laws compiled in the early half of the 11th Century. Book XIX, or The Corrector, was a penitential: basically a guidebook for confessors. Here's a sin, have u done it, here's your penance.

One of the questions for women was, essentially, "Did you make a dildo, strap it to yourself and fuck someone with it?". The original text is in Latin, and there's a few translations floating around of what it said. Here's one, which I spent the past three days looking for, because I wanted a direct source:

Have you done what women are wont to do: to make a certain device in the form of a male member to the measure of your will, and to tie it to your own or another woman's genitals with some ties, and commit fornication with other women, or others with the same instrument, or with another with you? - Translated from Latin, taken from "Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtichen Einleitung", F. W. H Wasserschleben

Pretty cut and dry re: the use of strap-ons. And dildos, because the next question is "and did you use this device on yourself?"

The second source is from the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, specifically Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) by Helmut Puff, which has an analysis of the trial as well as a translation of the trial texts.

Katherina is the first recorded woman to be executed for homosexuality. There's a lot to be said about her and the way she performed gender but what I'm interested in today is the strap. So, from the court text itself:

...She made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round; and therewith she had her roguery with the two women...