About

Hitomezashi stitching is a traditional method of Japanese embroidery that uses a grid pattern on indigo fabric. A video from the YouTube channel Numberphile described how to use text to create these patterns. Their method, however, encoded the design based on whether a particular letter was a vowel. Unfortunately, this means that each design is essentially a one way algorithm and that a design can't be "decoded" to reveal the original message.

If we instead create the pattern with the underlying binary data of the message, each design has a unique and "hidden" meaning.