Our daughter Sasha loves cacti.  She has a growing number of pet cacti.  She was thrilled to see cacti in the wild in Arizona last year.  So, when I saw a kit for crochet cacti at Barnes and Noble at Christmas, I bought it for her.  Now, I wasn’t sure of her crochet skills — but she is pretty artistic and has been painting and embroidering a lot lately, so I figured it would be right up her alley.

She thought the booklet was adorable!  All those winsome cacti with endearing expressions on their prickly faces.  She brought the kit with her when she visited us this winter — saying maybe I could help her get started.  Though when she got here she said that, of course, what she meant by “help her get started” was “actually make them for her”!

And, well, I do enjoy a spot of crochet from time to time…so what the heck?  The designs are very well done — and I learned a thing or two about cacti in the process 🙂 I decided to use my own yarn rather than what was provided in the kit (because I like working with wool) — and my brilliant innovation was to use pennies as weights in the bottoms of the pots.

I finished 3 cacti (4 if you count the Moon Cactus as 2 — which you should since the red ball on top is a separate cactus grafted onto the base cactus — who knew?) to give her when we visited them in Reno last month.

I am starting to get pretty fond of cacti myself now!