Puzzle Lessons

Finished this puzzle for Faye today!  I think it turned out great, especially since I was able to fix a couple of mistakes. Two tiny pieces of the photo had flaked off two of the pieces, and I had no idea where they were. Without them, the puzzle didn't look good, and I was really bummed out about it. But today I had the idea of sweeping up the sawdust around my saw and sifting through it, which I did for about 20 minutes before I found the first and smaller of the two.  Right away, I glued it back into place and you can hardly even tell it was ever separated.  But the larger piece was still missing.

I searched through the garbage and sifted and resifted the sawdust, and still, nothing. After about an hour of this, I gave up, and decided to try printing that bit of the photo and gluing it on, even though I knew it would be difficult to match it. I managed to patch the piece but it really didn't look great; it looked better than before, but definitely not as good as I would like. Then I decided to give puzzles a rest and went to the tool bench to get a knife to cut open some bags of mulch for my flowerbeds. And there it was. A little speck of white on the floor by the toolbench, the exact shape and size of the piece I had been hunting for. Right away, I glued it back on. The glue of the makeshift patch hadn't even dried yet so it was easy enough to scrape off.

The lesson I learned from all that is to make sure the saw is free of sawdust before I start a new puzzle so I can easily find any bits that are missing. I had the dust and bits of two weeks of projects to sort through today and it was not fun.

I also tried to start on Mom's puzzle, and learned another lesson. I had sprayed a layer of glaze on the photo a couple of weeks ago, but ran out of the glaze and was unable to do the preferred three coats. When I got back from Virginia, I sprayed another coat on. Today, I learned that when there is that big of a gap between coats, the top coat won't cure.  Every time I touched the photo it left deep fingerprints that would not rub off. I knew that by the time I had it cut there would be so many fingerprints the picture would be hard to see, so I threw it away and ordered a new print. Picked it up at Walgreen's a couple of hours later and tomorrow I will start all over again. This time I will do it properly, and hopefully it will be done in time to mail by Friday.