Hats!

I really do love hats.  In fact, one of the elements at our wedding reception five years ago was a little girls' "Teaparty with the Bride" where the little girls got to wear lovely, fanciful hats.

So...ever since I discovered that my extra pizza pan would stick to magnets I've been scheming to use it to make this fun magnetic hat toy for the girls.

1.  First, I painted the pan with white acrylic paint.  (You can maybe tell that it could have used a third coat, but I'm impatient).

2.  Then I hunted down pictures of each member of the family (including our dear suburban chicken Miriam, of course)  It actually turned out to be harder than I anticipated to find full figure shots of each person head-on.

3.  Using Microsoft Word, I sized the pictures to be proportionate to one another and printed them out.  (You can see that I didn't quite get the sizing on little G right.  Her head is much bigger than everybody else's and tends to dwarf the hats!)

4.  Using clear packing tape I "laminated" each person.

5.  Back to the computer!  This time using Google images to find all sorts of wonderful hats.

6.  Resized and printed them out, and "laminated" with packing tape.

7.  On the back of each person and hat I put a small piece of an adhesive magnet sheet.

I may end up using one of these pictures for our family Christmas photo this year.  It just might be easier than the normal impossible task of convincing everyone to smile at the same moment.  :-)

Yes, I am a bit enamored with the sight of Miriam the chicken in all these hats.
This post is part of Works for Me Wednesday,   The Amazing Mess, It's a Blog Part,  Making the World Cuter,  Motivate Me Monday,