Knitting the National Parks: 63 Easy-To-Follow Designs for Beautiful Beanies Inspired by the US National Parks

Designer Bates has written a creative collection of knitted hat patterns inspired by U.S. National Parks. Each chapter contains a description of a park, a knitted hat pattern, and a photograph of the park that inspired the design. Bates’s approach is flexible; she lists the recommended yarns, needle sizes, etc., for the hats but encourages knitters to experiment. The book is for intermediate-level knitters. It assumes readers have already mastered the basics, and it employs techniques such as cables, bobbles, and color stranding, with minimal instruction on these techniques. While the charts are easy to follow, they exhibit the three flaws common to knitting books: they assume the knitter is right-handed (left-handers will need to know how to make modifications to accommodate their handedness); it lacks metric conversions (non-U.S. readers will need to know how to do metric conversions); and it lacks a chart defining the stitch abbreviations.