Our family has a huge tradition centered around stocking stuffers. This years theme is to give something that reminds them of 2020. I decided that a lot of people worked on puzzles early on in this pandemic, so I thought I would make a custom puzzle for each person. These are 40-piece, and just a bit over 6" square. I probably went a slightly different route than most. I wanted to account for kerf so that the fit wasn’t loosey-goosey. I also… probably stupidly, decided to make all the piece cuts custom. Thankfully I’m doing all of the puzzles with the same pieces, just changing the engrave… but it means cutting the pieces out, then assembling the puzzle into a frame and then engraving the image and finally weeding the masking off. In all between cut, engrave, weed, etc… the process will take a couple hours per puzzle. The design can take me 20 minutes or two hours depending on how complex. The first one complete is for my niece. I may have made a mistake in doing in fluorescent pink clear acrylic though…
I plan on everyone opening them at the same time, and then competing to see who can build theirs first, and I’ll offer up some cash prize for the winner!
Pieces cut:
Assembled into engraving frame:
Engraved:
Weeded/final: