Tending to one's knitting

With Orthodox Christmas a mere two weeks away (we're not just rehashing an old argument, we're also in ur salez, takin advantidge of yer barginz), I'm working on several knitting projects, including a Fair Isle tea cozy. And, really, if anyone's got a more old-ladyish thing to say than "I'm knitting a tea cozy," I would like to hear it.

This is my first foray into Fair Isle knit, as opposed to intarsia work, and I'm keeping the pattern pretty simple, just alternating stitch rows (1-0-1-0, offset each row) and a sequence of small diamonds across the middle. Weebat and I have been exchanging idle thoughts on the options for knitting in code using Fair Isle, since adding a second color doubles the amount of information a given stitch can convey (knit versus purl, color 1 versus color 2). Madame Defarge is the obvious reference, and because Dickens leaves it vague as to exactly how her knitting was coded, we are free to speculate. Binary, we decided, is too unwieldy; you need too many stitches per character. Braille might work, but it would require keeping close track across up to three rows, it's not widely read by the sighted public, and unless you knew someone pretty well you might object to having your sweater read (or not, depending--no judging here). We settled on Morse code, although we were still debating the formatting and hadn't come to any conclusions about the format.

And then it turns out that Kristen Haring got there first anyway.