I love when inspiration for my next knitting project comes to me without too much effort on my end. Most recently, this occurred when I visited Saguaro National Park for the first time earlier this year. A cactus hat is the perfect knitting project inspired by the national park. Living in Colorado I am accustomed to seeing tall pine trees everywhere. However I was not prepared for the massive cactus that covered the national park! The cactus on the hills around Phoenix remind me of mountains after a forest fire; tall pillars of trunks left standing with no foliage. The scenery was impressive, a little eerie, and made me want to capture the beauty of the landscape in some way.

Cactus Hat Cast On

Shortly after returning home I was at our local library and happened to spot Knitting the National Parks by Nancy Bates. I took the eye catching book down from its display. Lo and behold there was a beautiful cactus hat inspired by Saguaro National Park! A huge selling point for the book is the way the hat is shown in two color schemes in the book. One is a daylight scene with green cactus and bright blue sky, and the other has shadowy cactus silhouettes against a colorful sunset sky. I am a fan of easy color work projects, like the Pac-Man hat and animal baby blanket mentioned here.

I cast on the green cactus hat first. I have a tendency to knit tightly, so I went up a needle size. The gauge provided is given in stitches per inch, but there was no guide on rounds per inch. While I matched the gauge, my first go around turned out on the larger side. It probably would have fit the Saguaro cactus! After realizing the hat was going to be too tall I tried to decrease quicker than in the pattern. That didn’t work either.

Revising the Cactus Crown

The top of the hat puckered and didn’t look as attractive as I was imagining. Instead of facing the problem right away I cast on for the night time version. This time I used the needle size specified in the pattern. The hat was again looming large, so I skipped a few rows of the chart and made the cactus slightly shorter in stature. By the time I had bound off it was a great fit!

Upon returning to the green cactus I ripped back down to several rows before the decreases. I added a lifeline. It took two tries, but I was able to get the crown shaping to work well.

Finally the last step was to weave in the ends (of which there were several given the two colors per hat and several joined yarn balls along the way) and give them a quick water bath. I wet blocked the hats flat to even out all the stitches. It always makes such a difference even if a project doesn’t initially look like it needs a lot of blocking attention.

I’ve already completed my next hat from the book, this time inspired from Carlsbad Cavern National Park. The winding cables bring a lot of texture to the fabric. It’s nice that there is a variety of techniques used in the hat patterns in Knitting National Parks.