BSJ and a new addiction

With the many kind suggestions, I started a Baby Surprise Jacket for the cousin-in-law's baby. Her name is Alyssa and she was born on October 22nd in the afternoon and everyone is doing fine. The Ravelry group for the sweater is awesome! I joined the monthly KAL and with the help of the their wiki and helpful suggestions for each stage (its broken into five), the sweater zipped along. There was a bit of boredom but I trudged along and soon things were interesting again.

I showed my WWSiP day samples all spun up in the last blog post. I was trying to find something to do with them and others that I have in my stash when I was reminded of doing the Barn Raising Quilt blocks for Sock Summit 09. I've been busy knitting them since completing the BSJ. Perfect TV watching project or knitting with the ladies. Their kind of like potato chips right now, can't stop at just one. I've used up all the mini-skiens from this year's WWSiP:

I have a few small skeins left to become blocks and then the project will go on hold until more join the stash. I'm spinning up a 7.9 ounce batt of Spinner's Hill. Its a combination of wool-mohair-silk in a gorgeous burgundy color. I'm going to try to finish up the first bobbin this afternoon. There's Portland Spinnerati Tuesday night, Wednesday spinning and Spinning Bee next Sunday, so lots of time to get the second bobbin done.

At the family dinner a couple weeks ago we found out that it had been decided not to the family exchange, so that helped with some of my knitting. I have some other craft ideas in mind for gifts that don't involve knitting. I'm also considering quick knit projects for those that do, like slippers.

Our spinning group had fun this last week. We all brought pumpkin items to share. There was pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin curry soup, pumpkin cookies and bread, pumpkin pie and pumpkin fudge. I made pumpkin pie from a roasted pumpkin that I pureed. It was the third such pie from that pumpkin. I had already tried out Bobbie Flay's Throwdown pies and everyone liked those. The recipe as is made two pies for me. Brandon took one to work for their Halloween party and it was gobbled up. I had half of one left so took that along with the Pumpkin Struesel I tried out. I had enough filling that I filled a few ramekins. This made it so that Kim who is on a gluten free diet could have some. If I do the pie again, I'd make sure that I had pecans on hand (had to sub in almonds) and some more butter so that it would actually kind of caramelize. We enjoyed our pumpkin potluck so much that we've decided to do something similar for December. Maybe a cookie one? 

Still some roasted pumpkin leftover, so may try out these pumpkin drop biscuits. Have you tried using roasted pumpkin that you've made?