FIVE FROGS WOODWORKING

Last spring, I was wandering around a community wide yard sale.  I discovered a local artist who makes beautiful watercolor paintings.  She had several that caught my eye.  One in particular jumped off the wall at me as an ideal puzzle subject!  So, I bought it and obtained permission to use prints of it for my puzzles.  The painting is of a flower.  But, she did not stop there.  The finished puzzle was cut into strips, and then the strips were woven together and framed.

I removed the painting from the frame, scanned it, printed it, and mounted it to a board.  When trimmed up, the puzzle was 11 7/8″ tall and 15 7/8″ wide.  After cutting, the number of pieces came out to 497.  This is a interesting puzzle, as I cut several of the internal edges as straight edges.  This will be not be easily assembled by starting with edge pieces!

Here is the pile of pieces before assembly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, something a little unique.  It is a fun puzzle, but not one to just begin with the edge pieces first!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The puzzle is cut and shipped off to its new owner!  This is the most complex and challenging puzzle I have cut to date.  732 pieces total, for an average of 2.15 pieces per square inch.  When I am done cutting a puzzle, I flip it over intact and sand it to remove all the little wooden “whiskers” that are created. Once it is sanded, I take it apart and count it.  Twice.  If the two counts come out different, I count a third time.  After the counting is done, I bring it to the house where I reassemble it in controlled lighting and take pictures.

With a puzzle of this size, I have discovered that is a little impractical, as it consumes too much of my time to reassemble it.  This one took me approximately 10 hours to reassemble, and that was after “cheating” by using a copy of the image for about a half hour.

 

 

 

 

Just before this point, I realized I needed to get moving on this puzzle so I can start cutting the next order.  So, I used another print of the puzzle to help me determine where the vertical panel line pieces went.  I would not have done that if I was assembling this puzzle for my own enjoyment.  So, after “cheating”, this is where I was at the 5 hour point.  I did not use the copy of the image again after this.

 

 

 

 

So, it is completed!  A fun and challenging puzzle to cut, and to assemble!  I have three more puzzles I can cut from this project.  I have the two smaller puzzles that will be comprised of the center two panels that were left over from the double stack cut, and I have the rejected broken puzzle that I can attempt to fix.

But, first, a request for the eggplant flower.  It will be larger than the test one I completed earlier.  It is printed and mounted and ready to cut!  The shop awaits.

 

This post should have come much sooner than this, but I ran into some difficulty.  Actually, through my clumsiness, I broke the first puzzle and had to start over!

I had contacted the customer about the color variation between the two prints, and she was willing to accept it as is. So back to the shop I went to start cutting pieces out.  One of the panels was precariously balanced on my saw table, and in an inattentive moment, it fell crashing to the floor. On the way down, it hit an obstacle or two.  One of the tabs broke off and one of the corners of the puzzle was fairly scratched up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a 10 minute search of the floor, I found the broken tab and glued it back in place, but the result left a lot to be desired.  There is no way I could try to pass this off as satisfactory.   There are actions I could have taken to salvage this puzzle.  I could have cut off the border, or I could have made an irregular border.  I may still do that at a later date and make a second puzzle, but my sense of craftsmanship would not let me do that.  This puzzle is a first for me with respect to the size and the technique, and I want it done right, the way I intended it to be cut.

Time to start over.  Overall, it was not as bad as it could have been.  I had not really started cutting any pieces out other than the cuts to separate the panels into pieces.  When stuff like this happens, I am better off if I walk away for a half day to ponder my actions.

The long delay came because of the weather.  I printed two new images, but when I went to mount them, I discovered my inventory of plywood backing in this size was lacking.  We had a week of pretty heavy rain, and I did not want to run to the store with my open pickup truck and bring wood home in the rain.  Once the rain stopped and I had a free morning to run to Windsor Plywood, I was back in business.  Since I had some color mismatch on the first set of prints, I replaced the ink cartridges in the printer and obtained much better results.

Alignment of the images in the second set of pictures was as good as the first set.

So, on to cutting!  At the halfway point, my rough count was 391 pieces.

The puzzle is now 5/6 of the way cut, and my rough count of pieces so far is 615.

 

One more solid day of cutting and I should be done.  Then it will be ready for sanding.  After it is sanded, I will count the number of pieces and box it.  At that point, it goes to the house to be assembled and photographed in better lighting.

 

A customer asked for a custom puzzle, but it is not a standard sized puzzle.  The image is in the public domain and is available on Wiki Media Commons.  The artist is Kano Eino and he lived in the last half of the 17th century.  The original piece is roughly 60″ tall and 142″ wide.  It was painted on six panels that are connected together.  When you translate those dimensions to standard printer paper sizes, it would be a oddball sized puzzle.  For example, on an 8 x 10, it would only be 4.2″ tall.  On a 13 x 19 print, it would be 8″ tall and 19″ wide.

So, my challenge is to print it on two sheets of paper and merge the two pieces together in the puzzle cutting process.  I decided to print it on 2 sheets of 13 x 19 paper, with a goal of a finished puzzle being roughly 13″ tall and 30″ wide.  The left three panels would be on one image, and the right three panels would be on a second image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I printed the pictures, I added “truth marks” where I wanted the images to be joined.  These are to help me position the images when I double stack cut them to ensure perfect alignment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I first cut my two mounted images into two pieces to make them more manageable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I next made cutouts in the piece that was to be placed on top.  The cutouts were to allow me to see my “truth marks” to align the pieces for cutting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I stacked the two pieces, looking at 6 locations for perfect alignment:  the two truth marks and the four corners:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now it is time to carefully glue the edges with a hot melt glue gun while maintaining the 6 alignment points in exact position:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The point we have been building up to:  cutting the double stack to merge the two images together:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the assembly is cut in two pieces, it is time to trim all the edges and get rid of the glue and excess borders.  I like to use a straight piece of scrap wood as a guide when cutting straight lines.  Cutting straight lines freehand can be a little difficult.  It leads to wavy edges instead of straight edges.

 

Now we have one large puzzle, ready for cutting!

Using the truth marks and the four corners made for perfect alignment of the merged images!  Unfortunately, my Epson printer did not manage to maintain a perfect color match from image to image.  These photos show a little bit of color variation.  The pictures make the variation look worse than it actually is.  I did not even initially notice it, but my daughter pointed it out to me.  Must be a difference in the age of our eyes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An added bonus is that the two pieces of waste material also fit together, and can be used to make a smaller puzzle!

 

The final size of the combined images after trimming is 27 3/4″ wide by 12 1/4″ tall.  The goal is to have about 650 pieces.

I will post more on this puzzle as I move forward.  I need to contact the customer about the color shade variation.

 

I had my first international sale today!  Until now, I had limited sales to U.S. addresses only.  I was not ready to tackle the shipping process.  It turned out not to be all that bad.  You can accomplish most of it on-line.

The U.S. Post Office has a decent website that is mostly self explanatory.  If you want to pay on-line and print your own shipping label, you need to sign up for an account.  Once you have an account and are signed in, you walk step by step through the process.

1. Select a destination
2. Declare an item value
3. Pick a mailing date
4. Select a package type – USPS provided or self provided
5. Enter the package weight
6.  Enter a shipping option – anything priority is pretty pricey!
7. Complete a customs form and print it
   • You do need to read the long list of things you cannot ship.  It is a composite list of things that the U.S. government does not allow to be shipped out of country, and things the recipient’s country does not allow in.
8. Pay for the shipping and print your label
9. Attach the label
10. Take the package, the customs form, and the bar code sheet that prints out the post office
11. They scan the bar code, review the customs form and attach it to the package, and you are done!

I found it interesting that by doing this on line, you save a couple of bucks.  My package was 2 pounds even.  The “list price” for shipping to Great Britain was $25.75.  The on-line cost was $23.18.  And, I was able to pay with PayPal.  The customer had paid for the puzzle and shipping via PayPal and I was able to transfer some of that money directly from the PayPal account to the post office.

Pretty easy process overall.