CUSTOM PUZZLES

over the sleepy time between Christmas and New Years, the kids and I had a blast with puzzles. a couple were gifted and when we finished those, we bought two more. and then a couple more… we were obsessed.

I thought it would be fun to make a custom puzzle using an image of my beads so I poked around the internet to make it happen. I’ve used shutterfly in the past to make custom puzzles but they only print rectangular puzzles and the image I wanted to use was square. I found collage and gave it a whirl.

I used this photo of my large, flat discs for the 676 piece puzzle.

a few things to note -

• the box the puzzle came had a tiny image and the colors were waaaay off. fortunately I had the original image on my phone to help with solving and luckily the finished puzzle colors matched the original photo.

• collage.com puzzle pieces are weirdly thin and either don’t fit together very easily or multiple pieces worked in the same spot.

• the puzzle was shiny which made it really hard to see what we were working with. I never thought about it before but there’s a reason puzzles are usually matte.

• also, the paper on the pieces peeled off easily.

• not the fault of collage.com but there is WAAAAY too much white in this puzzle. I struggled with those big corner sections.

I also ordered a puzzle with this image of my bowl of toothpicks (from my 2020 calendar) but haven’t attempted it because of the whole ‘too much white’ problem and the janky puzzle fit.

I’d love to try another custom puzzle but would probably go back to shutterfly. I’m also wondering what else I can customize with my beads!