How to Remake a Puzzle

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

There are lots of cute ways to upcycle an old puzzle into something completely new, but what if what you'd really prefer is simply another puzzle?

I mean honestly, have you ever looked at the picture on the front of a puzzle and thought, "Huh. I could do better than that!"

Well, you absolutely can!

It's surprisingly easy and doesn't take a ton of artistic talent to remake a puzzle into one that's brand-new-to-you.  This is a great craft for kids or a great way to make an educational toy for a kid. Here, for instance, I've remade a very odd puzzle (I'll show you in a minute, but trust me--it's ODD!) into a puzzle of the digits of pi. What classroom wouldn't want to have that on the shelf in readiness for a rainy-day recess?

Here's how to remake a puzzle of your own!

Supplies Needed

An old puzzle to upcycle

I have a very firm Puzzle Policy, which consists of this: we buy puzzles only from thrift stores or yard sales, never spending more than a buck or two. We happily put together our puzzles, knowing that it's highly likely that there will be missing pieces. When there are, we don't care, because we still had the fun of putting together the puzzle and anyway, it only cost a couple of dollars; I'll recycle or upcycle that puzzle, then, with a clean conscience.

When the puzzle gods smile down upon us, however, it's a real treat, and then when I put the puzzle back in the box I'll securely tape it shut, tape on a note that reads "NO MISSING PIECES," and donate it to a thrift shop to move on to some other lucky soul. So even though my family loooooved putting together this very, very, VERY strange puzzle, it has two missing pieces, so recycled or upcycled it must be:

Acrylic paints and brushes

You'll be watering the paints down, so a little will go a long way.

Paint Pens

These can be pricey, but you don't have to buy a full set if you're planning on a limited color scheme. I got by using only black for this project.

Spray sealant (optional)

Aerosol sprays are the WORST, but if you feel like you have to seal your work--I would only if it's quite detailed and delicate--then you'd better use this instead of a brush-on sealant, which will go on too heavy and stick the puzzle pieces together.

Directions

1. Assemble the puzzle, turn it upside down, and make any necessary repairs. When my kids were younger and much more emotionally attached to their puzzles, I figured out how to make a pretty decent replacement for missing pieces--it's at least good enough to make the puzzle complete again, although of course you can tell the difference:

Here's my tutorial for how to repair a puzzle by recreating missing pieces. Give it a try!

2. Paint the puzzle with watered-down acrylic paint. Watercolors would work, but wouldn't be vibrant, and acrylic straight from the tube would be so thick that the puzzle pieces might stick together. Instead, use a paint palette to water down your acrylic paints, and use those to paint your puzzle.

Pro tip: to avoid the colors bleeding together, let an adjacent color dry before you paint right up next to it.

3. Add details with paint pens. Since the acrylics have been altered to behave more like watercolors, when you want to add detail to your painting, you'll want to use paint pens. These are spendy, but they're absolutely terrific for fine work, and you can add tons of detail that you'd otherwise need the tiniest paintbrush for.

After all the paint and glue has dried, the only thing left to do is work your brand-new puzzle!

As you can see, this puzzle is even more fun than working one whose only claim to fame is that you bought it from a store, and the more time that you put into it, the better it can look. I kept mine pretty plain, because my children are heathens and wouldn't appreciate it anymore if I'd spent fifteen more hours on it making it look cute.

You could add a ton more embellishments with the paint pens alone, and there's nothing to stop you from adding even more decorative elements, such as Swarovski crystals, glitter, or anything else that you fancy.

Cut-off Shorts and Drawstring Pants

Every time the seasons shift, the kids and I go through the tedious chore of going through our huge off-season clothing tub and forcing the children to try on anything that looks like it might fit.

Will loathes this chore as much as anyone can hate something that's not facism, and requires at least one, and sometimes two, Come to Jesus talks before she can finally bring herself to do--the horror!--Something That She Does Not Want To Do.

The pro to this is that she'll wear anything that fits. Just does not care. Literally pulls the top items out of her shirts bin and pants bin and puts those items on and wears them, utterly oblivious to how she looks. Syd, on the other hand, although she is happy to try on all the clothes that I present to her, is far pickier about what she'll actually wear, and since by the time something is her size, it either goes to her or to the donation bag, there's more in-depth conversation about what might go with what else in her wardrobe, if something that she doesn't like now would be improved with a stencil or the judicious application of scissors or perhaps with vat dyeing, if maybe she'd rather wear it in the winter with something warmer underneath, etc.

You'll be simply shocked, I'm sure, to know that my wardrobe is a lot more simple. I made do with one pair of shorts last summer, but I wanted more this summer, so I went to Goodwill, found three pairs of pants that I liked, bought them, took them home, cut them off at the knees--



--and hemmed them. Done and done!

I also wear a lot of drawstring jammies around the house, so I figured that while I was at the sewing table, I might as well mend the ones whose drawstrings worked their way out over the past few months:

Done--



and done!



If you've never replaced a drawstring before, here's how to do it--it's super easy.

So that's our summer wardrobe taken care of, although I know that the kids long for more leggings, their favorite piece of clothing to wear (also the most fragile, easily stained and highly prone to tears, grr!). Leggings are actually pretty quick and easy to make, and I've even figured out a way to make them out of old T--shirts, so they're for sure on my to-do list...

Maybe for winter, though.

Secondhand Sand

This weekend was all about the thrifting. Of course, we did also go to the zoo this weekend and have Father's Day and watch Toy Story 3 at the drive-in, and last weekend we had the Monroe County History Center garage sale, so that was thrifting, too...

Just go with me, here. This weekend was all about the thrifting.

First, of course, are the Friday morning garage sales. We don't often hit these, but we were on our way over to the Community Garden, anyway, and I did just happen to have a little cash money in my pocket, and that's how we ended up with a Belgian waffle maker, a Ziplock baggie full of little plastic cowboys 'n Indians, and Sydney's new best friend:

For four dollars.

But of course, we all know that there is no thrifting like the thrifting that is the Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale. I bought T-shirts to remake into baby bags, a sorely-needed new pair of blue jeans, subtraction flash cards for Willow + road trip, several pounds of that colored sand that you layer into jars to make shelf pretties, two dinosaur books, etc.

Sydney's mania for all things pretty has nearly driven me out of my gourd. I am SO tired of the child's refusal to wear anything but dresses and skirts and tights and leggings and hairbows and barrettes. I have to braid her hair into two pigtails and put a bow barrette at the bottom of each pigtail every morning. Every morning! All the people who are reading this and who knew me as a child--I'm talking to you, Aunt Pam!--are laughing their asses off right now. I didn't even wear make-up to my own wedding, and here I am with a house full of pigtail braids and bow barrettes.

Anyway...this was the last storewide sale until September, which means that it's time to look into the fall wardrobe. I thought about buying Sydney some practical long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and then I thought, "Aw, screw it," and ended up buying her a big stack of party dresses:

Yep, party dresses. Lace and tulle and smocking and petticoats and  puffs and velvet and ribbons:

The child now has party dresses for play clothes. Whatever, she can wear leggings and tights with them when it gets cold.

Willow has her own methods for driving me nuts, but thankfully clothing is not one of them. A while ago now she tried for a couple of months to insist on "pretty" clothes, as well, but she couldn't stick it. She basically pulls her clothing from the top of her clothing drawers, and as long as she can climb trees in it and get it muddy, she's good to go.

I actually do take pleasure in choosing the children's clothes--even digging through acres of party dresses was fun when I anticipated Sydney's joy in being presented with them, and even though Will doesn't much care about what she wears, I take a lot of pleasure in choosing clothing that is centered on what she does like--dinosaurs, horses, farms, outer space--and clothing that is centered on what I like. That's why my kid is occasionally seen wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.

Usually, however, my clothing choices look more like this:

Or perhaps this:

Five years isn't too early for a kid to dress a little skater punk, is it?

Someone Else's Hand-Me-Downs

Sydney is VERY picky about her clothes. This has made the process of receiving hand-me-downs from Willow tiresome, likely for all involved. The purging of the winter wardrobe and the unveiling of the summer bins this weekend have resulted in a large stack of hand-me-downs that Sydney will not wear at any price and that thus are destined for either resale or donation, a large stack of hand-me-downs that Sydney claims she will wear when (if) I get around to sewing on decorative buttons or flower appliques or stenciling unicorns, etc., and a small stack of hand-me-downs that were deemed suitable for wear as-is.

The girls are nearly the same waist size, only Willow is taller, so, cropped pants still being stylish (I hope), some of these hand-me-downs have actually gone back to their original owner. Those AWESOME camouflage pants that looked so cool on Willow when she was three years old actually look even cooler as calf-length capris, and some other pants are in the same large stack on my work table waiting to be cut into shorts.

In other words, though, thank GOODNESS for the Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale. Along with some more T-shirts for baby bags and quilts (how awesome will a Godfather baby bag be? SO awesome), ANOTHER dinosaur board game, a sheet that will become jammy pants, a brand-new Hello! Kitty Figure-Baking Oven that it's probably wrong to be this excited about, and other sundries, I bought several long-sleeved jersey cotton shirts in Sydney-approved colors and patterns-- --to be sewn into summer-weight skirts and leggings, and Sydney got to get some hand-me-downs that she thoroughly approved of:

You gotta love her sense of style, at least:

I'll try to remember that shirt when I'm up late sewing butterfly appliques onto an otherwise perfectly serviceable pair of pants.

Sweatpants, Skirts, and Teaching Tops

One thing about living in a university town and working at that university is that you meet a lot of undergrads. Matt works with interns and the Student Alumni Association club, and as for me, I've got 40 or so freshmen that I engage in conversation and woo into some semblance of understanding of the analytical process and its reflection in rhetoric for three hours twice a week, not counting office hours.

And when you talk to undergrads that much for that long, you 1) gain a terrific understanding of popular television (I swear, half my students are writing their final papers on The Girls Next Door), and 2) do NOT gain an understanding of contemporary fashion. Um, why do I want sweatpants with words written on the butt?

And leggings came back? Seriously?

And apparently (because we had an entire conversation about this), you're still supposed to tan in the winter, but not as much because you don't want to get too dark, and you have to REALLY tan, like in the booth, because everyone can tell when you've spray-tanned because it DEF looks orange.

All this is to say that I don't dress like a freshman, but I bet you could have figured that out on your own. If there was a Torrid in town I'd probably throw my second-hand shopping ethic out the window--hell, I'd probably have my own Torrid card the way my mama used to have a Dillard's card because she bought so much there--but until then, I rely on the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale days and going through every piece of clothing in the store to find a few pieces that I like. So I bought low-rise cargo pants and a couple of tops designed to show off the tons of money that I have invested in a really great bra (my friend Molly calls these "boob tops").

I bought Matt a few more pairs of sweatpants, because he likes to go to the gym every night while I'm putting the girls to bed (chapter from whatever book we're reading, episode of Meerkat Manor, sitting in the dark goofing off on the computer while playing Pandora and waiting for snores).

And I bought the girls skirts:
And skirts:

And yet more skirts: Syd is the one who is obessed with skirts and dresses (dubbed "quitty kwothes"). Will likes herself a pair of good, soft pants, but will also wear the same dinosaur T-shirt for as many days as it take for me to get sick of it and rip it off of her body. Sydney will change entire outfits four times a day, easy (each time putting the entire old outfit in the dirty laundry, unless I catch her. This is one of the reasons that I'm teaching the girls to do their own laundry this month), and actually has a knack for putting together really interesting outfits that somehow work.

And she only has a few skirts, mostly Momma-made and thus all of the same style. So I skirted them up.

Also bought during the sale: a keyboard that may or may not work for lessons, so we'll do some research before the return period is up; a picturebook of Longfellow's Hiawatha poem; a tiny little loaf pan (Matt is all, "What are you going to make with this?" "Um, tiny little loaves?"); and yet another little horse.

Still on the must-buy-secondhand list: ice cream maker, new-ish crockpot (there are tons of older crockpots in thrift stores, but they're supposed to be fire hazards or something), and a black hoodie and an AWESOME cool-looking grey denim jacket with a stripe on the sleeve to replace those same articles of clothing, both bought previously at Goodwill, that I have left at one time or another in my classroom on campus and thus lost, leaving me broken-hearted.

Although if some other freshman stole my clothes, that does mean that they were up to their trendy freshman standards, I suppose.

And I Am Martyred by the Color Pink

Certain family members of the in-law persuasion have long made veiled accusations that I will not permit my girls to wear pink. This, I declare, is flatly untrue. Yes, it was completely true when they were infants--I actively put my girl babies in clothing gendered as male, but I'll tell you all about why I did that some other time. And yes, it's true that when I shop for clothing for my girls, I generally don't buy them pink stuff--when my kids don't care what they wear, I buy them clothes that I like. Who doesn't do that?

However, I firmly believe that I have always been extremely accomodating when they do show a preference. Why else does Willow have at least 12 dinosaur shirts? And pants with dinosaurs on them? And dinosaur jammies? And a dinosaur dress? And don't even get me started about the ponies and the rainbows, because I really don't feel like discussing it right now.

And therefore, since Willow has lately been complaining that she has no "pretty" pants (and since my suggestions that, since she doesn't like the pants I've bought her previously, she should really get a job so that she can buy her own pants hasn't led to her actually getting a job, alas), yesterday at the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale I invited her to come over to the children's clothing section so that we could pick out some pretty pants together.

It's hard, obviously, for a five-year-old to find clothes at Goodwill--they're sorted by color, which does help one zero in on the "pretty" pants, but only a Momma can accurately evaluate fit and condition and quality and appropriateness. Fortunately, it turns out that I'm actually quite good at ascertaining the kind of pants that my daughter will find "pretty".


If the pants are jeans, they should be fancy jeans:Otherwise, light blue is pretty:
Light green is also pretty:Purple, too, is pretty:So, yes, Willow and Sydney both came home with scads of pretty pants, and a few other pretty necessities----and even a couple of other awesome items:The future farm girls have a system for who gets to wear THAT shirt on any given day, let me tell you.

Other than that, some work shirts and work pants were bought for the man, some record albums and vintage sheets and T-shirts were bought for crafting, and the babies got more books, of course. But did I find any awesome clothes for myself, you ask?

Well, you can fail the PhD student concentrating on medieval studies through a feminist lens out of her qualifying exams, but you can't erase the ridiculous amounts of useless information about the medieval time period and its literatures out of her head: And also? When I was a little kid, I never, never, NEVER had cool clothes. And in junior high, one of the MAJOR things that I wanted (along with stone-washed jeans and T-shirts in two different colors so that you could roll the sleeves up and see the color of the shirt underneath and leggings and the dexterity to tie an oversized T-shirt into a knot at one bottom hem, etc.) was THE FOLLOWING KIND OF HOODIE THAT ALL THE COOL KIDS WORE:

Childhood dreams really can come true, can't they?

Especially when they're simple:

It's a Wrap!

By all rights, the girls should have been tearing the house apart on this rainy day until we finally gave up and left to spend the day at the library or Wonderlab or wherever, but after a nice breakfast together and an hour or so spent dying dried pasta weird colors, the girls basically spent the rest of the day having one long playdate with each other, leaving me to blog and sew and bake banana bread and catch up with my reading (You should totally be my Goodreads friend, by the way). I know, I know--the life of a stay-at-home mom is dang hard. But today was not one of the days in which I wanted to tear out my hair by 10:00 am.

Hallelujah.

And that is why I am basically done with the yard sale wrap skirt I've been sewing from:



Basically=I'll tell you in a minute. And ad nauseum. And I know you want to hear all about the many and varied modifications I made to the pattern. First, however, I'll show you the photos that occurred during a break in the rain when I changed into my new skirt (I'm also wearing the new bra, and I offer the news flash that non-nursing bras are not as comfortable as nursing bras), took the girls outside, and asked them to take turns taking photos of me in my new skirt:

I'm trying to get my head in the shot:

Still trying to get my head in:Shot nearly missed me entirely that time:I took this one (and yes, I do have funky tan lines on my feet, and I do let my daughters paint my toenails, and those are acrylic paint stains on our sidewalk):I give up--who needs another shot of my face, anyway?I'm much more pleased with this skirt than I thought I would be, mid-sewing--and also, I NEVER wear skirts or dresses, but a wedding is an emergency, wouldn't you say? And I haven't ruled out making a peasant top out of this same fabric and wearing it with dress pants, either, so don't think I'm skirt-committed, now.

This skirt was made from part of a queen-size sheet that I found at the Goodwill Outlet Store--I bet it cost me no more than 25 cents. And there is enough left of the sheet to make a peasant top, I really think, although I might have to do part of the sleeves in a different fabric.

And yes, the fact of the sheet begs the question--yes, I did find both the matching pillowcases, as well, and yes, I will be sewing matching dresses for my daughters to match with me. The campy transvestite in me wants to make Matt a matching tie, too, so we can look like we're going to some creepy family prom, but I will definitely restrain myself and perhaps just hem him a matching hanky for his suit pocket.

For you fellow plus-sized ladies, my waist is about 36", and I had to add two entire extra panels to this six-panel wrap skirt. This means that I also can't use the waistband and ties part of the pattern, either. I haven't finished the waist, but I'm 99% sure that my solution will be a bias tape hemmed waist, and kilt pins (read: safety pins) to fasten the skirt. Instead of the hand-sewn rolled hem that the instructions also called for, I machine-stitched a rolled hem with a satin stitch set to a short stitch length, and I think it looks very nice.

Now...shoes?

I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

The girls and I spent the day up in Indianapolis on Friday. We hit all my favorites--the Goodwill Outlet Store (I'm saving the INCREDIBLE puppet theater I scored for another post), the opening season of the butterfly exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo--

--and the Indianapolis Art Museum:
As I was shooting this photo of Willow in the contemporary gallery, and Sydney was happily stomping on the floor just behind me, with another photographer shooting another exhibit in a little niche just behind her, all of a sudden this huge guard starts running towards me, screaming at me to stop right now!

I'm all, "What? The baby can't stomp on the floor?"

And he's all, "You CANNOT take photos in this gallery!"

Without thinking, the first thing I do is whip around, point with my entire arm straight at that other guy taking some pictures in the nook, and shout, "But HE'S taking photos!"

The guard turned around and started shouting at the other guy, so I grabbed both the girls' hands and said, "We gotta go." Then we hightailed it.

Two minutes later, safely down the elevator, I stopped to think about it and I thought, "Really, Julie? You seriously sold out a stranger over a 'no photo' policy?" I can't believe that my instinctual reaction was to throw the blame and then flee. I mean, what kind of person does that?

I actually saw the guy a few minutes later and of course I apologized. He, of course, said it was no big deal, because, you know, it's just a "no photo" policy, not a criminal act, which makes it just even more ridiculous that I sold out a stranger and then ran.

Painting on the grass in the museum gardens was much more relaxing:
Although now I wonder--I hope there wasn't a rule about not being on the grass...

Doilies, The Day After

We've been happily integrating our newest purchases from the Goodwill Outlet Store into our daily lives. Two vintage puzzles, one of the entire world and one of the United States----have not left the living room carpet since they arrived, they're so fun. They're both crazy-intricate, with each tiny state its own tiny puzzle piece in the US puzzle and each tiny ocean its own piece in the world puzzle, although each big ocean is an awesomely big piece and each continent is its own piece, and? There's a compass built in!

I originally bought them for crafting because the world puzzle is missing a couple of its fiddly little oceans and the US puzzle is missing Kansas and Rhode Island, but the girls adore them (and actually I do, too), and Willow learned where California and Nevada live, so there you go.

I am a huge fan of divided plates (I would KILL for a set of elementary school cafeteria trays), so I'm all about these three orange divided plates that I found:
And do not worry, friends and family--Matt and I own these swab thingies that test for lead, and they're all-clear. Can you imagine, though? Instead of the CPSC bullying through that ridiculously overwrought CPSIA which will leave me without a job and without anyplace to buy stuff, they could just make lead swab test kits cheap and readily available, and we citizens could just handle our own shit, thank you very much.

The biggest hit of the day, however?

Paper doilies.

I almost didn't buy them because it was the day after Valentine's Day and doilies are kinda Valentine-y, don't you think, but then I was all, "Oh, they're going to cost like five cents and the girls will like them."

The girls do like them--negative space is fun space--but I think I may like them more. On account of look at the awesome stuff I made:

Goth doily pinbacks! I heart them crazy much. I like how they're partly fussy, but also all cool in their black-and-white at the party way, and I'm an especial fan of how the intricate and fancy doily pattern makes no sense in such a small scale.

And in yet another example (as if you needed another example) of how the girls inspire me and how all my work is collaborative work with them, blah blah, their interest in rainbows--drawing rainbows, reading about rainbows, having me pull up Google Image photos of rainbows, etc.--has led me to create, off and on in my sketchbook, an entire list of rainbow-themed crafts that I'm excited about doing. And when faced with doilies, a hole punch, and pretty paper, I made this:

I made a bunch for myself and my girlies, but I'll be putting these two sets up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop tomorrow. My pinbacks have been hitting the spot lately for some people, and I'm interested in seeing how these versions, which I like kind of crazy much, go over.

You can expect to see lots of frantic paper crafting out of me in the next few days, because Matt took my sewing machine to the repair shop (either it needs a new face plate, or the little girls need to stop touching it when I'm not looking), and the repair shop man said that we could expect it back in about 10 days.

He was just kidding, right?

Right?

Ghosts of Goodwill Past and Present

It was a happy year at Goodwill. Our town's two locations (also known as the College Goodwill and the Townie Goodwill) and their quarterly 50%-off Storewide Sales allowed me to clothe my family and craft within my ethical belief system and also afford to feed my family, too, occasionally.

At the March sale, among other items, we got all of our springtime clothes:
See? Even our first-born wears SOMEBODY'S hand-me-downs. Is that fair, or what?

At the June sale, the start of craft fair season, I boosted my recycled/vintage craft supplies, among other items:
And then the girls threw them all over the floor.

At the September sale, we started living the dream with our brand-new DanceDanceRevolution mat:
I am getting REALLY good, and Matt is almost ready to start moving his arms when he dances.


At the December 6 sale, among other items, it was long sleeves and sweaters for everyone:

And bare feet, of course--oh so practical in the -20 degree wind chill.

And Saturday, happily, was a bonus before-Christmas 50%-off Storewide Sale. Among other items, we scored Uncle Wiggley--

(a terrific game for arithmetic concepts, by the way, and I was seriously in need of more math ideas); stretchy cotton sweaters for little-girl skirts--(somebody else had that idea first, but I can't find the link just yet); dinosaur fabric--for dinosaur quilts; a VERY nice coat that will get several years of use by two children for $2.50----a very nice shirt for me that you have to squint to see through the camera-shake, finger over the lens, and two two little girls----and? Best of all? A SECOND DanceDanceRevolution dance pad.

You know what that means, right?

Dance-off.