Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:826:crypto-embroidery (Neal Stephenson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

I made this up, but would not be at all surprised if someone had actually done it. It is prefigured, of course, in Madame Defarge's knitting in “A Tale of Two Cities,” to which you can consider this an homage if you like.

My wife reports to me that you would have to be a very bad embroiderer to cross threads in this manner by accident. Therefore, anyone familiar with embroidery would immediately see that something was amiss. Not as stego a cryptosystem as you hoped. --RussNelson

While enjoying the book immensely, Eliza's encrypted embroidery took things a little too far. Over and above the obvious complexity of such a system, and the diligence required to employ it accurately, Eliza appears to have been fleeing at the time, with few possessions and through various terrains... not quite the optimum situation for masterly encryption... that said, I still asked for part two of the trilogy as 40th birthday present. Obviously still hooked. No pun intended. --Andrew Manson, England.