Making a Puzzle
I really like my mother-in-law. She’s been my “French mother” since I married my better half, who happens to be French-Canadian. And while I struggle to speak with her, my mother-in-law is an important part of my life.
Lately, though, she’s been having some health problems and I thought it might be nice to do a little something to cheer her up. As with all grand-meres, her grand-children always cheer her up and I’ve got one living at my house. I thought about sending the granddaughter to live with my mother-in-law but I think the key to grandparents liking their grandkids is that they go home.
I had a set of patterns for cutting puzzles from Steve Good, whose The Scrollsaw Workshop is one of best sources of scrollsaw information on the Internet. Steve’s downloadable book costs only $7 and includes templates for a bunch of different sized puzzles.
I decided to keep my puzzle relatively small and so I chose the 5″ x 7″ template. I found a photo taken of Jodie and I during a Harry Potter party and thought it would be a good candidate for a puzzle and so I printed it in 5″ x 7″ as well. I used glossy photographic paper and an inkjet printer to make this print. I do think that using a satin finish paper would have been better but I didn’t have any on hand.
In addition to the template and photo, I cut a piece of 1/8″ masonite and a piece of 1/4″ MDF. Both were cut to 5″ x 7″.
I used Elmers glue to attach the template to the 1/8″ sheet and the photo to the 1/4″ sheet. Some might prefer to use spray adhesive for this.
I stacked the template piece on top of the photo piece and covered it with packing tape, tying the two pieces together. Make sure the back of the template piece is clean so nothing is between this piece and the photo that might scratch it.
The packing tape serves to hold everything together but it also lubricates the scrollsaw blade during the cut. Actually it’s the chemical placed between the tape layers on the roll so the tape is usable.
Before cutting the puzzle, ensure that the scrollsaw table is square to the blade. This is of particular importance here as if it is not the case the puzzle pieces won’t fit together.
The rest is simple, cut along the lines, cutting out the pieces. Ok…’simple’ is probably not the right word as there are a lot of lines to follow. But here’s the saving grace. You don’t have to be that accurate when making those cuts. With puzzles, the lines are more like the pirate code in Pirates of the Caribbean. As Capt. Barbosa said, “They’re more like guidelines.” Try to follow them but don’t panic if you deviate from the them.
What’s more important than staying on the lines is that if you get off the line, slowly, and smoothly return to the line rather than making an abrupt turn to get back on the line. If you do this, the puzzle parts will look just fine and they will fit together perfectly.
If you look at the upper right part of this photo you’ll see that I purposely deviated from the lines just to demonstrate that it doesn’t cause a problem in the finished puzzle. I hope this will help newcomers to puzzle cutting to relax with the knowledge that this process need not be extremely precise – errors are acceptable.
I do hope my mother-in-law likes the puzzle. I enclosed it in a wooden box and gave it to her for Mother’s Day.
Cheers — Larry
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Way to go Larry. I am sure she will love the puzzle especially since it is of two of her favorite people.