A Secret Message

Steve and I had a big surprise to share with Trevor related to my newly-acquired membership as a Creative Professional in the Craft and Hobby Association. Rather than tell him outright, I wanted him to decode the news. A surprise is even more fun when you have to work for it, right? Right!

I started by writing my five-word message in large letters on a piece of copy paper. I put a second piece of paper over the first and used a black pen to draw a line under each letter. I went to my stamp collection and pulled out one small stamp for each of the unique letters in my message. I stamped each letter in the message with a different stamp. As you can see, the letter represented by the red heart appears 7 times in the message.    

Next, I made a key. I randomly assigned each letter of the alphabet to one of the numbers from 1 to 26.

Finally, I took a third sheet of copy paper and used my key to stamp each item the correct number of times. There are 10 red hearts. So, according to the key, 10 = D.

I gave Trevor these three items with no explanation or instructions whatsoever. It only took him a few seconds to understand that he needed to count the stamps in order to decode the message. He got right to work, so excited.

In case any of you want to try decoding it, I'll wait a day before sharing the solution!