Filet crochet of the Arecibo message. My first stab at filet crochet.

The Arecibo message was broadcast into space a single time via frequency modulated radio waves at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope on 16 November 1974. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away because M13 was a large and close collection of stars that was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony. The message consisted of 1679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 1000 kW. The "ones" and "zeros" were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes.

- Wikipedia

This message to the stars was only broadcast via radio waves, but it is gibberish until the bits are displayed graphically on a 23x73 pixel grid. Only then does it reveal obfuscated data about the planet Earth and its human inhabitants.

Filet crochet, at its most basic, is a binary technique, and it lends itself well to pixelated designs. Like knitting has its knits and purls, filet crochet has open and filled squares. For this project, I interpreted 1s as filled squares and 0s as open squares, and I used a convenient graphic from Wikipedia as my chart.

I ripped this back three times and changed to a smaller hook size. Unfortunately, my tension fixed itself after about 10 rows. This means the bottom flares.

If I were to do this again, I would use two chains for the spaces and two double crochets inside each filled square. This seems a little thread dense and needs some open space to highlight the image.

In Futurama’s episode “Godfellas”, Fry loses his best friend, Bender, in deep space. In a desperate search for Bender, he uses the universes’s most powerful radio telescope/amplifying transmitter to send out a message to the stars.