Flowering Cactus

As part of my everlasting bout with the flu, I made a cactus out of yarn.
It’s not, perhaps, the most beautiful cactus ever, and I think the next ones (oh yes, there will be more) will be more … steady, but this one’s not half bad. And it’s flowering. And here it is on Jeff’s desk. It appears to be next to his “Hunter S. Thompson for Sherriff” mug, hiding behind the water bottle. I’d also like to mention that if you should forget Thompson’s name, Google will refresh your memory if you type in “author sherriff drunk.” Hey, we all leave a legacy, right? His is, at the very least, interesting.

My inspiration was a picture from the free patterns pool on Flickr. Her cactus has a better crocheted pot than mine … I don’t think I did a good job following directions (me, what a shock!) and so it turned out somewhat more large and basket-shaped than I intended. But I have ideas about making better pots. Did you know there’s a whole Knit & Crochet Cactus Flickr pool? So many ideas for more cacti.

I was inspired to make cacti by my boss’s collection of cacti. She has 5 or 6 little pots on tall stands with a different cactus each. They bloom, they grow, they love the big window they sit in front of. I’d never much thought about cactus - the prickly pear sort grow around here, they bloom, they’re prickly. But she pointed out their sculptural qualities, and watching the different sorts grow over the past months I’ve seen what she means, and now I’m really fascinated too. It also probably helps that they’re in these really simple but lovely pots that she made. She makes pots that really quite outdo normal terracotta.

I don’t know that my first fabric cactus has that sort of sculptural quality, but … we’ll see. One of the nice things about crochet is that it can be formed and stuffed in so many ways.