I recently purchased the Itty Bitty Hats book to make some hats for my son. I started out with the basic roll brimmed hat. The hat patterns only gave out age ranges for size and not finished head circumferences, so I measured my son's head and made the hat roughly his head size. Well I neglected to realize that the hat needed to be smaller than the head circumference due to stretching, so I got this:
That wouldn't work, so I gave the hat to my husband. It fit him quite well.
Then I attempted to make another hat--the one on the cover of the book. I made the hat slightly smaller than the first one, but it still didn't quite work:
That hat I claimed for myself, since I wanted to make an adult-sized version anyway.
Realizing finally that I needed to make the hat at least 2 inches smaller than the head circumference, I began the third hat. I used the basic rolled brim hat as my guide but did a 2x2 rib for an inch instead. I didn't want the rolled brim this time. This time it worked!
Although I'm pleased with this hat, I wished I would have done the ribbing for 2 inches. I'll make sure I make that adjustment for the next time. These hats work up quickly, so making another one will be a snap!
I recently scanned in a set of my mom's photos so I could make copies. Before I could do that, I had some repairs to do, so I fired up Adobe Photoshop Elements. I used primarily the clone and the healing brush tools to do the restorations. As a result, I was able to restore quite a few old photos. I was able to repair two badly damaged vintage photos--one of my grandparents and one of my great-grandparents. I also reparied an old-style family photo taken when I was a child that was damaged and had a background that didn't cover the photo area completely. That is the photo I posted here. You can see the before and after versions. In order to remove dressing area was visible in the photo and cover it with the backdrop, I copied part of the backdrop and put it on another layer. I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the area not covered by the backdrop and stretched the copied backdrop layer to fill it in. I merged the layers and then used the clone and healing brush tools to blend in the new portion of the backdrop so that it looked natural.
I'm quite pleased with how this and the other photos turned out. I'm getting quicker with using the Photoshop tools. I'm really enjoying being able to repair and restore these photos, too. With each restore, I am preserving memories!
