Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park Hat

 

I have completed my first Nancy Bates’ National Park hats. I have to acknowledge Sharon who I met in January. It was our conversation at the Knitty McPurly Cozy Mountain knitting retreat where I learned there was such a thing as hats for National Parks. We are huge lovers of the NPS and have been checking off the parks on our list for more than 20 years. How could I not want to make hats for National Parks we have gone to in the past? At the retreat I checked out the Nancy Bates Designs website to see what all this was about. 

So......I bought the book and was enchanted. So many amazing hat designs. Especially seeing hats for parks we have seen in person it really is outstanding how she managed to capture these parks. We are going out West in August to visit 2 probably 3 National Parks. One will be new to us the others we have seen before. I plan to make the hats and take pictures of them at the park in the wild. As I set to work determining which hat to begin of the three I realized that my initial idea of using stash yarn wasn't going to work for two of the three. I tried to find substitutions but I wasn't having much luck. I decided to see if I could get any yarn kits from Nancy Bates website. 

Those kits go fast! You have to grab them while you can. I was then thinking ok, I'll just look for the yarn online. That's not as easy as I thought it should be either. I was able to locate yarn for Mesa Verde but that was all. 

I was having the most difficulty finding the correct shade and texture of yarn. This is the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park hat. I used to live in Gunnison, Colorado. That’s also where I met the Mister.  The yarn, Anzula, is wonderful to work with making the knit so much fun. The pink shimmer yarn that Anzula makes is not as plentiful as I thought. I ended up buying the kit for this hat which was one of the few she had in stock. I also bought the Big Bend, Texas kit. That kit requires several colors of yarn and after searching for the yarn to make the Great Sand Dunes hat I realized these kits are the way to go for multi-colorwork hats. This hat now done I am moving on to the next hat. We know for sure that we will be able to visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park so that is my next project.