Date: May 22nd
Category: Hidden Histories | Craft as Protest | Resistance & Espionage
Forget digital encryption — the original resistance tech was needle and thread.
For centuries, especially in times of war and oppression, textiles became a secret language. Quilts, embroidery, even samplers carried hidden messages, smuggled maps, and calls to action — stitched carefully between the seams.
Today, The Time Traveller’s Guild uncovers the ingenious world of resistance quilting and covert crafts, where every patch, thread, and pattern meant more than met the eye.
🧶 The Underground Railroad & Quilt Code Theory
Perhaps the most famous tale of resistance sewing comes from the Underground Railroad, the network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in 19th-century America.
While some historians debate the specifics, oral traditions hold that quilts were:
- Hung on porches or fences to signal safe houses
- Contained coded symbols like flying geese (direction), log cabins (safe houses), and bear paws (mountain paths)
- Passed down within communities as maps stitched in metaphor
🧠The “Drunkard’s Path” pattern may have suggested zigzagging to avoid capture.
Even if not all tales can be verified, quilts did offer communication when speaking out loud was dangerous.
🧷 Wartime Stitching: Subversion Behind Enemy Lines
🪡 WWII & French Resistance
During World War II:
- Women stitched coded messages into clothing linings and handkerchiefs
- Resistance cells used embroidered monograms to identify safe contacts
- POWs even stitched maps into uniforms using invisible thread
In one case, a French seamstress used colour-coded hemstitches to pass information between Allied contacts — her “mending service” was a cover for sabotage.
🪢 Subversive Samplers & Feminist Embroidery
Even in peacetime, women turned their stitches into satire:
- 18th-century samplers included double meanings, political initials, or jabs at authority
- Victorian suffragettes embroidered banners and prison handkerchiefs in Holloway Gaol
- Today’s artists continue the tradition with cross-stitched protest slogans, banners, and zines
✍️ One 1912 suffragette stitched the name of every woman imprisoned that year into a linen cloth — a quiet, furious act of remembrance.
✂️ Want to Try It? Covert Stitching 101
Modern DIY project:
- Choose a quilt block pattern (e.g. Flying Geese or Log Cabin)
- Assign meanings to each colour or shape (use our downloadable code chart!)
- Use embroidery to stitch dates, initials, or phrases in Morse code
- Keep it subtle — or don’t. Let it shout in thread.
🎨 Perfect for crafting protest art, commemorative pieces, or quietly radical gifts.
🛍️ “Sewing is Resistance” Collection
- Morse code designs (with Guild key)
- Totes: “I stitch therefore I resist”
đź›’ Shop the Collection
đź“š Want to Know More?
- Hidden in Plain View by Jacqueline Tobin & Raymond G. Dobard
- Threads of Life by Clare Hunter – An emotional journey through political needlework
- Needlework as Resistance – Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Quilt Codes and the Underground Railroad – American Folk Art Museum
đź’¬ Share Your Stitches: #GuildQuiltCode
Made a secret-stitch piece? Know of a family textile with a hidden message?
Share your work with #GuildQuiltCode and tag @TimeTravellersGuild — we’ll feature your most brilliant, beautiful acts of stitched resistance in our May 31 wrap-up.
