FIVE FROGS WOODWORKING

Here is the start of my latest project.  I have been enjoying the fall colors.  Our pin oak in the back yard had some beautiful color to it.  I selected one of the leaves and scanned and printed it out on a 13″ x 19″ print.  The scanner picks up some amazing detail.

Oak Leaf in Fall Colors

If you zoom in on the photo, you will notice the tips end in some very delicate whiskers.  When you look at the cut puzzle, it does not have those!  They would be too fragile.  I just cut the leaf tips out to a point, and even those are proving to be a little problematic.  Here is the leaf cut out of the background.

Cut out leaf

You will notice a couple of items.  A color change and it is not as clear.  The first picture was taken in the house under incandescent lighting using a Pentax SLR digital camera.  I manipulated the photo a bit with Adobe Photoshop Elements for some clarity, but it is a much better picture and is closer to the true color.  The second picture was taken down in the shop with  my cell phone camera under fluorescent lighting.  The picture is not nearly as clear and looks more purple.  The next sets of pictures below were taken with the camera on my tablet in the shop under fluorescent lighting and are better than the cell phone pictures.  All cameras are not the same.

Here is the puzzle cut in half.  I cut it in half for a couple of reasons.  One is that it is easier to handle as you are spinning the image around to make the cuts.  The second is that it reduces the amount that the same piece of puzzle gets handled, which leads to less wear and tear on it.

Leaf Cut in Half

This is the same picture, but cropped and zoomed in on some of the tips of the leaf.

Tips of the leaf

You may notice that the whiskers are not there.  You can also see how sharp of a point they come to.  Those points are fragile and tend to be a problem point while cutting.  I have to be sure and hold the puzzle by some of the straighter edges to prevent damaging the tips.  In some cases, the print either lifts from the wood (rare now that I am using the dry mount press) or else the paper begins to de-laminate (this will be the topic of another post on another day).  When that happens, I apply a small dab of white glue under the surface of the print, pinch it together, and wipe off the excess glue.  I then place the piece on the work bench face down and put a weight on top of it for about 30 minutes to let it dry.  The less often I have to do that, the better!

I started this project a couple of days ago, and have not gotten back to it.  So far, there are 29 pieces cut.  I expect this puzzle will have between 120 and 150 pieces when complete.  It is hard to judge odd ball shapes like this one.

29 Pieces Cut So Far

In the background, you can see my bottle of glue.  Right next to it are a couple of engineering squares that I am using for the weight while the glue dries.  My stack of new blades is also sitting there.  There is also a flip cell phone, but not the one I used to take pictures.  It is odd, but my “good” cell phone does not get any reception in the shop.  The cheap $5 flip phone in this picture gets great reception.  So, it has become the shop phone.

I hope to get this puzzle done this week.  I would like to get it listed on Etsy by the weekend.  I have listed a few of my puzzles for sale on that website recently.  I have also cut out another one of the eggplant flower puzzles that I need to get photographed and listed.  The listings on Etsy are going up for a couple of weeks, but will come down in early November, as I will be unable to respond to sales.  They will be listed again after the Thanksgiving holiday in time for Christmas shoppers.

Feel free to leave any comments and feedback in the boxes below about either my puzzles or my website.  Also, be aware that many of the pictures above are thumbnails and can be clicked on for closer review.

Happy puzzling!

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.

Barbara Hoisington Water color painting of flower

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!

Some of the internal straight edges are shown. Others are not

Here is the pile of pieces before assembly

Pile of pieces to start. Pen and fingers for size comparison

Pieces spread out to begin

I started with the greens and dark blues

Then I moved to the reds

Then came the light blues

Then came the rest

The backside of the puzzle

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.

Done cutting! Picture taken in fluorescent shop lighting.

Back of freshly cut puzzle before it is sanded.

Pile of pieces ! 732 of them.

Border pieced together after two hours.

5 hours into assembly.

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.

Roughly 9 hours into assembly

9 hours and 57 minutes!

Signature frog with other figures

Backside of puzzle – sanded this time

Finished puzzle

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.

Scraped up corner

Broken tab

Side view of broken ply

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.

Better color match. Slight difference in picture is due to lighting and wood angle

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

Example of alignment of the merged images

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

Halfway done cutting

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

Five Sixths of the way done

Backside view – unsanded, so it looks rough

Backside with car keys for size comparison

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.

Unusual sized jigsaw puzzle

The two prints stacked up

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.

Top truth mark

Bottom truth mark

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

The Two Prints Cut in Halves

Pieces stacked for visualizing end product

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.

Bottom Cutout

Top Cutout

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

Top truth mark alignment

Bottom truth mark alignment

Corner alignment

Another corner alignment

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

Glue gun warming up

Edge glued, ready for cutting

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

Cutting on the saw

Another view of cutting

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.

Trimming the edges

Now we have one large puzzle, ready for cutting!

Merged panels 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!

Perfect alignment, but some color variation

Another view of color variation

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

Waste pieces are the center two panels of the painting.

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.