On the hottest day ever recorded in Britain, we bought a scarf. Not just any scarf though: this one has a quotation from Ada Lovelace encoded into it.

Creator Sam Meech is an artist based in England’s creatively fecund North West, who among many other endeavours has made a small range of knitwear with techy messages knitted into them.

As Sam puts it, “Binary scarves are a series of knitwear informed by the ASCII text system of encoding text to binary. Each design contains a quote related to either computers, binary, patterns, digital art, or repetition. The designs are presented within the constraints of a standard 24-stitch punchcard pattern repeat. The scarves have been produced in collaboration with a factory in Manchester, ironically named Unique Knitwear.”

Our scarf carries the message, “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. Ada Lovelace, 1843”.