Handmade Wooden Puzzles

This is a Guest Post by the super amazing One Hundred Dollars a Month reader Mel.

I’m not sure how it happened that I ended up making a homemade gift for my toddler almost each December of his life (e.g., the Advent Calendar and the quiet book), but it’s ended up being a cool and useful tradition.

It’s cool to make some gifts instead of giving him the usual mass-produced toys (don’t worry—he gets some of those too!), and it’s useful because he has a lot of motor delays where many mainstream toys do not work for him.

For example, this kid has long outgrown the simple peg puzzles but could not really do the cardboard jigsaw kind.

I’m not totally sure why—it’s probably a mix of the lack of feedback to his hands (you really can’t feel cardboard pieces lock together) and some vision issues—but the upshot was that I needed simple wood jigsaw puzzles for him.

And there were very, very few on the market. And so began my year of handmade wood puzzles, leading up to a set of wooden Christmas puzzles to gift him for St. Nicholas Day.

It took me a while to make peace with the fact that I was going to have to hand paint these things, but once I did, I found an amazing Etsy shop that sells custom blank wood puzzles.

You can choose the number of pieces and the thickness, so I ordered 2” x 4” two-piece puzzles in ¼” thickness. This made them nice and chunky and easy to hold, and my son only had to connect two pieces to finish each one, so they were very rewarding for him.

If you don’t want to hand paint them, I think you probably could print images and modge podge them on, but I really don’t like modge podge, so I didn’t attempt that.

Instead, I used these materials:

• Acrylic paint
• Paint brushes
• Pencil
• Unfinished wood puzzles
• Polyurethane (and an extra foam paint brush to use for sealing)

And I followed these steps:

1) After finding images online to incorporate or reproduce (sometimes I would wing it or combine found images), I sketched the outlines in pencil on the blank puzzles.

2) After sketching, I filled in the pencil outlines in with acrylic paint.

3) Finally, I sealed the puzzles with polyurethane (or another non-toxic sealant).

For the most part, I found it easier to sketch, paint, and seal the pieces with them all connected. Sometimes I would separate them to get at tight corners or to make sure the pieces weren’t sticking, but generally I kept them assembled.

The first set I made was based off of Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and was gifted to him for his birthday.

He has been a Carle fan since he was 4 months old, so I knew that these images would be both interesting to him and also extremely recognizable such that he would have an easier time assembling them.

The day he turned 3, he received them and was immediately in love with them and able to do them.

Since he really loved the first set, and since they were also great for some of the things he needed to work on in occupational therapy (fine motor skills, two-handed coordination tasks, etc.), I decided to make more.

Halloween was approaching, so I made these. Another hit!

He then started getting interested in Disney characters, so I made these.

He assembled them at least four times a day for weeks (Side note: I will never tire of him calling Tinkerbell “Tinky Bells”).

And then Christmas was approaching. I considered getting another round of two-piece puzzles and doing Christmas characters (e.g., a snowman, a nutcracker, etc.), but I thought he might be ready to level up to more pieces and more complex images.

I ordered more puzzles, but this time I went for nine-piece 6” x 6” ones and decided to do some Christmas scenes.

(In case you are wondering, yes, that is the stray cat I have been trying to tame for the past four years.

She finally moved in and loves my son, so I painted her waiting up for Santa for him and making Christmas cookies with him.)

While the process was the same, the sketching part required a bit more planning for the Christmas puzzles than I anticipated.

If you’re making these for an adult or older child, you probably don’t have to put a ton of thought into the designs, but I followed these strategies to make them easier for a puzzle novice to assemble:

No two pieces look so much alike that you could confuse them.

So, the tops of the trees are not going to be confused with Santa’s boots because visually, they’re very different even as part of the same scene.

If you do a design with an empty snowy field, for example, it’s going to be much easier to confuse pieces.

If multiple pieces have a lot of the same colors, then I tried to vary the texture to make them more distinct and easier to tell apart.

So, the Christmas tree, wreath, and chair are all green, but the tree has pine needles, the wreath is boxwood, and the chair is velvet.

Almost every piece is directional. It’s going to be very clear how to orient the pieces because you’re going to know that the sky is at the top, Santa’s head is above his body and feet, etc.

The puzzles are leveled in ability. The Santa one is easiest, and the cookie one is the hardest.

So, he can do the Santa one solo now but still needs a bit of help with the other two.

The colors are vivid, and the images have a lot of visual depth.

The added visual interest makes them extra engaging, so there’s more motivation for a small child to keep working even if they find it challenging. When assembled, they create a scene that draws the viewer in.

There’s a lot of visual feedback baked into that telling the kid “you did it right! Look at this cool image you made come to life!” And there’s also a lot of Christmas magic in that.

And there you have it! More than 50 custom puzzles in 6 months. And one very happy 3 year old.

~Mel

 

More Tutorials By Mel

• No-Sew Christmas Quiet Book
• How to Make Fabric Gift Bags
• Mini Sewing Room Makeover
• DIY Lemonade Concentrate
• Super Simple Summer Tomato Pasta
• Experience Joining a CSA and Eating More Vegetables 
• Making Apple Cider with a Presspple Cider
• Mel’s Under The Sea Bathroom