Elements that went into this idea:
(a) Last spring or so, I got a bright idea to do some kind of puzzle-ish game for a friend I did escape rooms with in the beforetimes. Then I couldn't think of jack shit, so I gave up on that idea and felt stupid.
(b) Last month I was looking through Etsy for birthday gift ideas for said friend--I found a robot (Data) themed card. And around that time I found the Luvbots pattern and well, that's as close as I could get for matching the card since I just wasn't loving any of the Star Trek stuff I was finding. Also, as someone on Ravelry said, this is as close to gifting a hug as one can get.
While looking through Ravelry as to what others have done with the pattern, I found that some people had put magnets into their robots and a few had done something with binary code.
I loved this magnet idea and I ordered a pack of what turned out to be very tiny ones. Had I been able to shop in person, I think I would have picked out bigger magnets. They were very powerful for tiny magnets, mind you, and they definitely fit within the hearts, but I think larger ones would have had more staying power. If I ever do these again, I would get larger ones.
A tricky thing about the magnets (other than sticking to things) is that I couldn't just stick the magnets into the hands and sew them up--they kept creeping out of the yarn when other magnets were near them. So I ended up having to sew them into a bit of fabric before embedding them in first, and it is kind of a lot between the fabric and the yarn to magnetize.
I actually tried to embed magnets into the sides of the robots for hugging purposes--I knit a tiny pocket, sewed it in--but I don't think they work so great to attach the robot hands to with all the layers of yarn and fabric, sigh.
It works better on the hands than the sides.
Kinda worked here. Here is a doctored photo with what I intended, though--didn't really stay on both sides there, sigh.
Bummer. Oh well, at least the hands work.
(c) As for the binary code, I loved this idea originally, but it turns out that binary code is a pain in the ass, what with the 8 digits and this pattern really worked better with six, binary code is long and tedious just to do two initials and much less anything else, etc. That said, I do admire that someone snuck binary code into the Mars rover.
Morse code, as it turns out, is pretty easy to read, learn, and replicate. And also, someone on the Internet did a Morse code scarf, so that's doable. So I got the bright idea to do purl stitches to replicate Morse code in the robots. I didn't replicate the Fair Isle in the original pattern because I think it would have made it hard to see what I was doing.
I'm not going to say all of the messages I embedded in this (some are song lyrics from songs we both like, and one's a bad heart pun), but one of them is "Happy birthday, it's a secret message" on the front of the robot. If you want to see if you can read it, you can give it a try, though I dunno how well that's going to translate in photography. I assume not so well. I took several shots and none of them come out all that great. I think they show up better stuffed and in person than when I was knitting them, but we'll see.
Whether or not the friend will figure this out, who knows--on the one hand, they don't knit, but on the other hand, they work in the craft industry and like puzzles/mysteries. I figure odds are 50/50, but I did leave some hints as to what I did in the birthday card. Not to mention that I sent the friend the Mars rover thing and said that I missed escape rooms, and they agreed. So....foreshadowing, perhaps?
(d) Author Mary Robinette Kowal will send you a free postcard if you ask for it. I did this some months back, got the postcard, passed it to said friend at Christmas. Imagine my surprise a month-ish or whatever it was later to receive another one in the mail, this time with text on it. I was rather confused at the time of receiving the card because the secret message said to click on something and I couldn't find anything to click on. Finally I eventually just Googled "Mary Robinette Kowal secret code" and found this whole explanation, which eventually finally made sense. I forwarded that on as well.
To that end, I have written a similarly coded message into the birthday card and a bit of Morse code in the accompanying little robot drawing I threw in.
We shall see....I'm not going to ask if they ever figure it out or not, but will be pretty amused if they figure out where I was going with it, at least.
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