Aunt Jeri’s Christmas puzzle

I got this card from my Aunt Jeri. I can remember going over to her home on Christmas when I was younger and having a good time there. She had a Nintendo with a TMNT game and a marble rolling game. Both were too hard for me but I liked playing them. She also had a lot, if not all, of the Wizard of Oz books. There are a lot of things I like and remember about my aunt but those are the two I’m writing down today.

This was another of the early puzzles. I tried to follow lines in the picture and that was only semi successful. You can see this a bit along the gate, bridge, and the red strip along the bottom.

I was so keen to do this card because of the ribbon. I thought it would be fun to leave the ribbon intact. You can see that the cut for the piece goes behind the bow. I achieved this effect by just, you know, folding the bow out of the path of the blade. I think it makes for a fun piece.

This is a 32 piece puzzle. That is probably the biggest difference between the earlier puzzles I cut out and the later puzzles. The later puzzles are more in the range of sixty pieces.

Here is the back, where you can see the individual pieces more clearly.

I think, looking at the puzzle, that one other difference is as I made more puzzles I became more economical with the number of tabs in a connecting side. Here you can see several pieces that have two tabs in a single edge between two pieces. As I got a bit better at handling and planning out the pieces I cut I tended to only have one tab per edge. I think this is a holdover from cutting puzzles on my old scroll saw which had a much wider kerf and resulted in looser puzzles that felt like they benefited from more purchase points. Cutting those two tabbed pieces in half would also help increase the piece count.

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