This versatile pillow cover, which features four pattern options and three seaming options, is inspired by two aspects of wartime knitting: knitting espionage and relief knitting.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the virtual event “Knitting in Code” hosted by the McGill Libraries on March 9, 2022. You can watch the replay of the event on McGill Libraries’s YouTube Channel here. This event was part of McGill 24, McGill University’s annual day of giving. In lieu of payment for this free pattern, please consider making a gift to McGill Rare Books and Special Collections.

Historically, knitting espionage has included the practice of relying on knitting as a “cover,“ as soldiers and government officials easily overlook a women of any age occupied with knitting notions. In other cases, knitting was used to disguise messages, such as by hiding knots in wool or silk that corresponded to a secret code. This pattern provides two options to encode your knitting: Morse Code and illusion knitting.

Relief knitting was especially prominent during the World Wars, as the Red Cross provided needles, yarn, and standardized knitting patterns across the U.S., Canada, and Britain to encourage knitters to make hats, sweaters, and above all socks to keep troops near and far from home warm. Some manuals also included patterns for more fanciful items, such as Mary Thomas’ Modern Knitted Cushion that appeared in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross published in 1939, on which this pattern is loosely based. This manuscript has been generously digitized for this project thanks to the efforts of McGill’s Digitization Services (available here).

Finally, I have tapped into the lived experience of relief knitters by encoding the first stanza of Katherine Hale’s poem “Grey Knitting” into Morse code. Published in December 1914, this poem reveals what life was like for women on the Canadian home front during WWI. Hales dedicated her book Grey Knitting and Other Poems to “The Women who Knit.” This book of poetry has also been digitized by McGill and can be found here.

The designer, Kristen Howard, and colleague Jacquelyn Sundberg published a paper on the series of knitting events hosted by McGill Libraries from 2021-2023 in RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Cultural Heritage in Spring 2024. The article is available open access for all to read here: “Crafting Connections: Bridging Collections & Communities with Knitting.”

Pattern Details

Size:
Approx. 15.5 x 15.5” to fit a standard 16” pillow form

Yarn:
1, 2, or 3 colors of worsted weight yarn, approx. 450 yards total

Suggested Yarn:
Patons Canadiana, 100% acrylic (100g/205 yards)

Sample 1 shown in Medium Grey Mix
Sample 2 shown in Red and Black

Suggested Needles:
US 7 (4.5 mm)

Notions:
Two stitch markers, tapestry needle, scissors, waste yarn (optional), 5 small buttons (optional)

Gauge:
18 st x 26 rows = 4” (10 cm), knit flat and blocked

Pattern includes four options for the knitted fabric:

1. Morse Code Message (charted)
2. Illusion Knitting (written)
3. Moss Stitch
4. Plain Stockinette

And three seaming options:

1. Mattress stitch
2. Three-needle bind-off
3. Button closure