Our family is so excited to welcome a new little cousin this month. He’s just a week old and as cute as can be. Babies are wonderful any time of year, but what’s especially fun about fall babies is that you get to dress them like pumpkins.

I learned how to knit pumpkin hats just last year. My friend Cathy shared a photo on Facebook of her cat napping amongst balls of yarn. The cat was adorable, but what caught my attention was the pumpkin hat she was knitting (Cathy, not the cat). The next time I was at my favorite yarn store, I found a cute pattern in a book called Itty-Bitty Hats by Susan B. Anderson, bought some yarn, and went for it.

The hat starts off pretty simple: you cast on a bunch of stitches, then knit 7, purl 1 for about 6 inches. Then you start decreasing, which works fine if you concentrate and don’t try to watch “Friends” at the same time. The trickiest part for me was joining the brown yarn to the orange to make the stem. I really need to sit down with someone who knows what she’s doing to learn how to properly join yarn. The leaf is pretty straight-forward once you figure out how to “make one,” aka add a stitch.

I sewed the leaf over the spot where my stitches were a little loose from my attempt to join yarn. Now I just have to package the hat up and send it off.

I didn’t have a baby handy to model the hat, so I used my old doll, Heidi. She’s a bit scruffy with age, but I love that my girls played with her, too. And if you squeeze her tummy, she wheezes. I wonder if that’s why my asthmatic little self loved her so much.

I haven’t knit all summer, but something about the cooling temperatures gets me itching to get out my knitting needles. How about you? Does fall make your creative juices start flowing?