DIY Blank Jigsaw Puzzles

Jigsaw puzzles continue to be a huge thing around our house and now my little guy wants to design his own. We bought a blank jigsaw puzzle from the educational supply store -- and that was fine -- but they only come in three styles: huge pieces, medium size pieces, and reasonably small pieces. If we did that more than once, every puzzle would have the same shaped pieces.

What fun is that?

So it was back to the Dollar Tree for a couple of inexpensive puzzles and on to Walmart for some white spray paint because I couldn't remember if I had any light grey left over from the Coke bottle jet packs. If you've got outgrown puzzles and a can of paint at home, it's a free project. And who can argue with those?

This is the kind of project that's so easy it almost doesn't need instructions. Put the puzzle together on a piece of cardboard. Take it outside and spray with light coats until you can't see the original design.
For our first try, I separated the pieces first because I was afraid they'd stick together. Don't do that. Because even if you lay them out in careful rows someone will get over-enthusiastic and mix them up and even a 24 piece puzzle is enough to tax Mommy's brain when every piece is solid white. The paint won't glue the pieces together.

If your little artist makes a mistake or changes his vision midstream, just take the cardboard back outside and repaint it. Our puzzle now has six or seven layers of white paint because he started with pens, smeared the design (one of the perils of being left-handed), and repeatedly changed plans.  That may just be my favorite part of this whole thing. The puzzle may never get finished and probably won't get reassembled, but it happily filled his afternoon.

And did I mention that the Monster High puzzles at the Dollar Tree, even if they're too girly for my son's taste, are shaped like coffins?

More Puzzles

Remember that jigsaw puzzle that I bought a couple of weeks back, against my better judgement? Based on previous experience with my older kids and other puzzles, I just knew that it was going to be a disaster. 

I was dead wrong. 

This is our second puzzle, which I picked up at the Friends of the Library Bookstore for fifty cents. The two youngest, with a little help from me, put it together over the course of two afternoons. It's missing thirteen pieces -- and had two extra pieces from an entirely different puzzle  -- but the boys are okay with that. We're blaming the previous owner. 

Puzzle number three was  hard. The pieces were too small and didn't stay very well together once they were matched up, and older siblings messed up our careful sorting once or twice before we decided to give up on that one. Lesson learned -- 500 piece puzzles from the Dollar Tree aren't a good purchase. 

We're doing much better on our current puzzle:

The plan is to coat the puzzles with glue after we finish them. I never in a million years would have guessed the jigsaw puzzles would make my eight-year-old son so happy! Or that he'd be a fan of Charles Wysocki and Thomas Kinkade. 

Jigsaw Puzzles

It's the season for blog posts about saying no to your kids more. I'm trying to think  twice about what I say no to and why I'm saying it. That's after too much time over the years spent with moms who use "no" as the default answer to just about everything. Of course I'm going to refuse requests that are seriously unreasonable, or dangerous, or mean, or expensive or a bad idea for whatever reason. I'm talking about those "no"s that you say without even listening to anything that came after "Can I...?"

This week, my youngest son asked if he could have "one of those puzzles with lots and lots of little cardboard pieces."

I don't do jigsaw puzzles. My older two had wonderful wooden puzzles which they never put together. I decided early on that I'm not the kind of mom who keeps all of the pieces together. It's been years since we had anything like that in the house.

We stopped at the Dollar Tree where they have an entire aisle of jigsaw puzzles. They were the wrong kind. He wanted a puzzle in a tray. No problem...those were on the next aisle over. But those didn't have enough pieces. Leif wanted one with lots and lots of pieces and a tray so he could put it together in the car. (It's not uncommon for one of my kids to have his heart set on something that doesn't exist. Remember the possum costume?)

While I did some fast brainstorming and tried to figure out if there was a resonable way to make what he wanted happen, I told him to take a deep breath and trust me. Big silver foil baking trays are deep enough to keep the pieces from falling out and large enough to lay out the entire puzzle. But the bottom isn't flat enough to make a decent work surface. (We would up adding a library book to the mix.)

I've got to admit that I expected this project to end badly. Handing over a hundred piece puzzle to a little boy in the back set of the minivan, even with a big foil tray to contain the pieces, seemed like a recipe for disaster. But he had his heart set on it and I was willing to give him enough rope to hang himself. If the pieces wound up on the floor, I wasn't going to try to find them all.

By the end of the day that puzzle had been assembled and taken apart three times, all in the backseat, and we'd gone back to the store for a harder one. (It turns out that five hundred pieces is too many. And that's okay.  Not finishing that puzzle doesn't mean we can't get another hundred piece puzzle later if he's still interested.)