You know what I love more than pumpkins?

Nothing.

Okay, that may be a little extreme, considering the love one feels for a squash should not equal the love one feels for family.

Still.. they’re so cute and orange!  And tasty.  Let’s not forget tasty.

I’ve tried to trace my fondness for this bulbous autumn vegetable to try to find a source, but I feel that it’s a combination of a few things: spending several of my early years in a small town outside San Francisco called Half Moon Bay and, perhaps, Jack Pumpkinhead from the “critically acclaimed” (and I say that with all the love and sarcasm I can muster) 1985 film Return to Oz.  If you’re a child from the 80′s, enjoy talking moose heads and fearless chickens, this movie is straight up your alley.

There he is, on the right. I'll wait here while you add it to your Netflix queue. Won't take but a second. And look at Tick Tock! So shiny and handsome! I could gush further, but this is about pumpkins not childhood cinema guilty pleasures. But, perhaps if I knit my own Scarecrow I could bring this movie up again another time...

Anyway, there’s a picture hanging on my mother’s wall of little-pig-tailed-me crouching in a pumpkin patch with the biggest grin on my face.  This year, on our way up to visit my husband’s family for Canadian Thanksgiving, we stopped at a sprawling pumpkin patch in Washington to browse their knick-knacks and take photos of pumpkins.  Well.  That’s why I stopped.  I think my husband stopped because I was clawing at the door and shouting, “LOOKTHEREAREPUMPKINSSTOPTHECARSTOPTHECAAAAAAR.”

I'm a bit bigger in this picture versus the one on my mother's wall, but you get the idea.

That's road fatigue on his face. Also, the general loathe of anything farm related. He's a good sport!

In August, for my birthday, my friends gifted me a few balls of yarn and a pattern to make a “Precious Pumpkin Beret” by Anna Connors (purchased from her Etsy store).  We work in construction so we joked about how the shade of orange they picked up was suitable for a Safety Hat and, not-so-secretly, one of them hoped I’d hate the color and want to donate the orange to making tiny desk pumpkins all October.  I did donate, in the end, but only once I’d finished not one, but two pumpkin berets.

When you see these pumpkins again, they will be grossly mutilated and burning from the inside. I mean, carved, smiling and sitting at our doorstep.

This may be the first thing I’ve ever made where size made a difference.  Scarves are scarves — sometimes they’re shorter and sometimes they’re longer, but they still work just the same.  And if the scarf ends up being shorter than I planned, I just give it to a shorter person to make up for the inches and start again.  The one I made first is on the left.  The yarn weight may have been slightly lower than what was called for, so it came out a little small on me but adorable on Monique.  So, I made a larger one which I think is a tad too large, but is still acceptable.  Also, instead of Safety Vest Orange I went with a Lion’s Brand skein of “Wildfire.”  I added a few rows to make it droop more in the back as well.  If I really wanted to wear it day-to-day, I’d probably accept these as the first two steps of the Goldilocks Method and do one more, using that weight of yarn and not adding any rows.  Then it would be just right.  But it’s a pumpkin beret and I’m running out of Fall here, so we’re leaving it at that.

I'm especially fond of the color changes.

Here they are, side by side, so you can see what a difference yarn weight can make in a project!

We did end up adopting a baby pumpkin from that farm in Washington.  We smuggled him across the Canadian border, too.  On the way back we declared him, though, because we had bigger things to smuggle.  No, not drugs or firearms, but a gift from my mother-in-law: a full bag of sheered wool, fresh off the sheep.  But that’s a story for another day.

His name is Pascal. He's the most well-traveled mini-pumpkin of his time (except for those grown far away and trucked in to be dumped in supermarket bins). Pascal travels in style.