The oak leaf puzzle is completed! It came to 180 pieces. That does not sound like a lot, but this is one tough puzzle! I assembled this one myself just to see how it went. The complex leaf outline combined with the consistent color makes it very challenging for its size.
Before I talk more about cutting this puzzle, I have to tell on myself. As I was reviewing photos for this blog entry, I had to laugh when I found this one. When I started this puzzle and realized I was going to have to do a little bit of gluing on the tips of the leaf, I looked and looked, but could not find my glue bottle. Up the house I went to get a different bottle of glue. So, I brought down the bottle of red labeled Titebond. Look at this picture. What do you see?
Glue bottles
Yep, right there on the blue shelf, about 24 inches from my nose, upside down so the glue is ready to come out of the spout, is the missing bottle of glue! I think I looked for 15 minutes for that thing! Oh, well. At least I know where it is now.
On my last entry, I had completed cutting 29 pieces. This weekend, I finished the bottom half of the puzzle, and then cut the top half into half again. Once again, this is to minimize handling damage while cutting the puzzle.
Top cut off
The middle piece kind of looks like a bat! I also cut the tips off of the bat wings before finishing up.
Bat wings tipped
I know I am making a big deal about minimizing handling damage, but here is a picture of what the concern is.
Fragile tip
You can see the very pointy tip of the leaf is looking a little fragile. Alternating layers of the plywood have broken away. On this piece, I had to re cut the leaf tip to fix this.
I finished cutting the puzzle on Saturday and sanded the back before bringing it up to the house. I could not resist and decided to assemble the picture myself. It is only 180 pieces and should only take an hour or so, right?!?
Here is the pile of pieces after counting.
Pile of pieces
Some assembly pictures:
Assembling – 3 hours in to it!
Assembling – 4.5 hours
Assembling – now with help of a picture!
At this point, in the interest of getting this assembled in a timely manner, I looked at the computer image to start lining things up! This is not an easy puzzle to assemble without the picture.
Starting to look like a leaf
Finished!
Backside of puzzle
You may have noticed there is not a frog piece. Instead, I signed and dated the stem.
This puzzle will be listed on my Etsy shop FiveFrogsWoodworking.
Thanks for reading!