Ashley D'Antonio

The National Park Service celebrated its centennial in 2016. A year or so before, I suggested to my knitting group (I was living in Utah at the time) that we design a group knitting project to celebrate the centennial, sell the pattern for the project, and donate the money to the National Park Foundation. With the help of about ten others, a donation of yarn from the company “Knit Picks,” and many hours of knitting and pattern writing – we created the “National Park Centennial Celebration Blanket.” Each national park that existed in 2016 (59 at that time) inspired a blanket square designed by someone in the group. Each pattern for the blanket squares contains information about that national park and how to knit the square. Since my knitting group was mostly graduate students and academics, personal stories about our visits or research in these parks also made their way into the patterns and designs. As of November 2020, the knitting group has raised just over $3,000 for the National Park Foundation through sales of the blanket patterns. I oversaw formatting and posting the patterns for sale on a popular knitting website, so I was given all the “test squares” that we knit during this project's design phase to photograph. I finally sat down and seamed together the individual squares into a full blanket just a couple of years ago. This blanket is special to me because of the people who worked with me on this project. Many of them helped teach me to knit when I was first learning, and many of them are incredibly dear friends to this day (even though we all now live in different places spread across the U.S. and Canada). Most folks know I am a fan of national parks - but when I look at this blanket, I think less about the parks the squares represent and more about the people who designed these beautiful and creative squares representing places that inspired them. If you are interested in close-up photos of the individual blanket squares and which park each square represents, the full pattern page can be found here: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/sources/national-park-centennial-celebration-blanket