Addled by Australia.

For Christmas I made a puzzle for my friend Kelli!  She is serving a mission in Australia.  The nice thing about making a gift for a missionary is that you can totally show it off on the Internet without worrying about ruining the surprise.

There are ninety-eight pieces! I think. Maybe there are only ninety-six. Still, that is a lot of pieces! Initially I was going to make it twice as large but when I saw how big it looked printed out I realized that that might be a little bit excessive.

Did you notice how it is speckled? I still can’t get over how that makes it looks so much better.  I painted the blues together and the yellows together, then I assembled the puzzle and then I disassembled it and separated the pieces into four different piles.  The different piles got some additional tinting to make the pieces a bit more varied in hue.

Oh!  This puzzle was the first time I ever made special figure pieces!  Well, I guess that isn’t QUITE true.  I did make a star before.  And a heart.  But this time I made the letter K and some fish and a flippin’ sweet kangaroo!  Seriously, look at how awesome that kangaroo is!  Don’t … don’t pay too much attention to the star, though.  There were some issues?

Here is the completed puzzle.  Notice how some of the edge pieces have little knobs and slots so that they look like interior pieces?  I felt rather tricky about that!  Another puzzling technique is to make it so that a slot for a knobbed piece doesn’t appear until two other pieces have been put together!  You can see in the lower right corner where I did this.  Above the kangaroo is another pretty good example.

Making puzzles is super fun! I made a few more for Christmas times, but I can’t show them yet since they aren’t being sent to people that can’t access the Internet. Rest assured, they are pretty awesome.