I made my very first hand-cut jigsaw puzzle.
It's made from a greeting card from a set that someone got me on the false assumption that because I own cats, I adore all things cat related. Before I talk about the actual cutting, I have to point out that this card is HORRIBLE. Oh, you just glance at it and think "Oh, cute, climbing kitten playing with something. No, take a look. There are two mice baiting this naive little 6-week-old WITH A MOUSETRAP! When that thing snaps, there's gonna be broken bones at the very least, with a possible need for an amputation or the kitten may even have to be put to sleep. That's AWFUL! There's nothing cute about this.
That's why I used it for the first puzzle, because I knew I'd have mistakes in it. It started when I coated it with a triple-thick glaze. The glaze went all... weird. Kinda textured, like air bubbles on something. But only on half the card, so I couldn't pretend I meant to do that. I'm not sure if it was too humid or I did something wrong applying it. I'll try something different next time.
Cutting this was a lot harder than the experts make it look. I didn't do too bad for a first try, though. I started in the upper lefthand corner, and it shows. I started trying to do the color line technique Carter Johnson teaches, and promptly got my ass kicked. I just couldn't control the blade with that level of precision. A line along the top of the paper scroll doesn't actually interlock for a couple of inches as I was figuring that out. I also lost control of the blade while making a knob and ended up cutting a circle out instead; oops. That's one of two unintentional drop-outs; the other I missed where I wanted to join another piece and accidentally ended up trimming a couple of millimeters off instead.
Eventually I figured out that style wasn't doing it for me and instead switched to a squiggly knobby style instead. Now THAT was fun! I made a point to cut around rather than through some of the picture elements, but didn't stick slavishly to the color lines. This sort of squiggly style (executed with more skill) was popular back when most scroll saws were hand cut, but it fell out of favor as die-cut cardboard became the norm. I imagine the thin sections are hard on the dies. I have noticed more freeform commercial puzzles rather than just the traditional grid cut recently, though.
This puzzle took all three samples blades that Mike's Workshop sent me to try out. The first one dulled about halfway through. To be fair, it's cutting a long linear distance through a lot of blade-eating materials: paper, glue in both the plywood itself and gluing down the paper, acrylic finish. The second one I broke on my next-to-last piece. My first broken scroll saw blade ever, it's a milestone. ;) The last one did survive the last two pieces, I'm glad to say. I've ordered half a gross more; we'll see how long those last. I've decided to do the next ones with pictures from some Dover archives I have (public domain resources, yay!), so I've got three pics printed up on two different kinds of paper waiting for the ink to get good and really dry, then I'll glue them up, try coating them, and give it another go. :) When I'm better at it, I plan to also do some puzzles with some of my photographs and original art -- although because most of my digital art was sized for a screen instead of print, I'm not sure I currently have anything with a large enough resolution.
No, I don't have any idea what I'm going to do with them all once they're cut.
