Altered Puzzle Challenge Week 1

Welcome to the blog today, I'm so excited to begin a new challenge. This is a continuation of the Altered Playing Card Challenge that I started back in August of 2014. That challenge ended in March of this year and it was so much fun. My Facebook group and some others asked me to continue on with another challenge. Something different but with the same thought in mind. 

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So today we are going to begin the Altered Puzzle Challenge

There isn't really a challenge per-se' but your challenge to yourself is to begin this project and follow along each week and finish it entirely. I think as crafters we sometimes begin things and never finish them, I know I do this often. So the challenge for you is to simply do that, finish it. 

So for this week, we are prepping our pieces so that we have a nice surface to work on. Most puzzles are slick on the surface and we need to make that something workable.

So the details on my puzzle are that it's a 24 piece puzzle, each piece is roughly 3"x 3" and the overall size of the puzzle is 

15" x 11 1/2"... I found mine at a thrift store for 99cents. You can try checking dollar stores, thrift stores, Rite Aid or Walgreens or Walmart. You puzzle doesn't have to be exactly the same but I will be doing 24 pieces. 

So to begin we need to sand this puzzle a little over the top

I used my Tim Holtz sander for this but a bit of sandpaper will do the trick

You just want to sand a bit, don't sand so much that the ends start to tear

I used a baby wipe to clear off the sanding dust from the surface

You can see the sand marks here

Next, you will coat the surface with TWO coats of gesso. 

I used two coats because I felt one coat was too transparent and I could see too much of the puzzle background through it

This is the difference between one and two coats

I wrote numbers on the back of my pieces, Starting from the upper left-hand corner and moving across one row and then continuing to the second row and so on and so forth.. this way I can easily put my puzzle back together once it's altered

All of the puzzle pieces were layed aside on wax paper to dry for a few days. 

Come back next week to begin altering two pieces a week for a total of 12 weeks.

Our Facebook Group is here if you would like to join us

 Facebook group, we share photos and ideas and it's a great place to share inspiration

We have a new Pinterest Board for the puzzle challenge here

Pinterest

If your interested in doing the Altered Playing Card Challenge you can find the start of that here:

Altered Playing Card Challenge

Even though the challenge is over, the posts are all there so you can still complete it

The Pinterest Board is here:

Pinterest Board

Thanks for coming by, see you next Monday to begin this adventure