My Lil' Punkin'

So you all know by now that I love fall.  This certainly includes any baby/toddler knits that remind me of fall! :)  Last year around this time I found the cutest little hat for X to wear.  He was only 7 months old at the time and wasn't too concerned about whether he had a hat on or not.  I found a pumpkin hat.  I had seen a picture of someone else's little boy wearing the same hat and so I asked her where she got it.  She told me it was from Gymboree or some place like that and she had found it online.  I quickly hopped on the internet and found the hat she was talking about and that I had seen.  X wore this hat for a LONG time, well after we'd had our first snowfall.

This was was just a basic knit hat in stockinette stitch.  It had a stem and a couple leaves just like Susan's pattern except much more basic.  X and I got tons of compliments on this hat, everyone loved it.  I probably paid somewhere between $10-15 for the hat.  I bought it before I knew how to knit, but every time I looked at it I kept thinking, this really couldn't be that hard to make, could it?  I could do something like that!

So imagine my delight when I discovered Susan had included such a pattern in her Itty Bitty Hats book!  (Which I purchased shortly after looking through Itty Bitty Toys and joining Ravelry.)  Thinking back, I can't believe I paid so much for a little hat I could make myself for so little!  And Susan's version is cuter, if you ask me.

So this fall, when the weather started turning cooler, my immediate thoughts were on Little Pumpkin by Susan B Anderson.  And then I was off and running.

There's a Pumpkin Hat KAL (knit-a-long) on Ravelry, but I needed X's hat finished before it started so he could wear it to the community Spook Walk.

This hat is super simple in construction.  If you can knit, purl and decrease, you're in business.  There's only one color change.  The leaf is knit separately and attached at the end.  Certainly an easy hat for a beginner.

I knit X's hat with KnitPicks Shine Worsted in this lovely color of Marmalade.  I had 3 skeins of this color left over from another knit project for a friend.  Since I already had it in my stash and it was the perfect color, I went ahead and got started.  For the stem I used KP Swish Worsted in Truffle and the leaves were made from KP Shine Worsted in Laurel.  All of this was from my stash and it felt SO nice to use yarn I already had (it also meant I could start right away!).

Knit in the 1-2 year size, this hat could easily fit an older child.  In some of the pictures you can see it's on an adult-sized styrofoam head.  It's a bit more stretched out this way, but it's a good example of how much wearer-flexibility there is.

I chose to add 2 leaves instead of just one.  Hubby helped make that decision.  We both agreed it looked even better this way!

So even though he wouldn't keep it on very long at first, this little hat did keep my lil' punkin's head warm as the night progressed and it got cooler. It was a great hat for the Spook Walk and we received several compliments on the hat.

And just because he's so cute, here's X in his costume, a little puppy dog.  He kept pulling the hood down so by the time we got to the booths, he was a pumpkin-headed puppy, but I don't think he minded. :)