Knitting the national parks 63 easy-to-follow designs for beautiful beanies inspired by the US national parks

"Artists... have captured and immortalized these beautiful places and personal memories for generations. The time has come for knitters to do the same," urges pattern designer Bates in her innovative debut. Each of her gorgeous designs highlights features of America's national parks: brown bears and salmon adorn the Katmai National Park hat, textured stitches mimic balancing rocks for the Arches National Park beanie, and fall colors make up the Shenandoah hat (autumn's the most popular time to visit the park). Though newbies will miss a knitting 101 section, crafters who are confident in the basics and are up to speed on reading colorwork charts will have no trouble following the patterns, which range from simple stranded designs to the more intricate cables and bobbles found in the Joshua Tree cap. Trivia about each park is a nice addition--readers will learn that "at 14,400 feet, the peak of majestic Mount Rainier is covered with snow year-round, even during summer," and that "95% of Biscayne's 173,000 acres" are underwater. This is a treasure trove of creative patterns that seasoned knitters will turn to time and again. (Aug.)

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. VERDICT Buy where there is reader demand for intermediate-level knitting projects, with the caveat that this is for experienced right-handed U.S. knitters; left-handed and non-U.S. knitters will need to know how to do their own conversions and where to look for stitch abbreviations.--Marjorie Mann