I'm putting the puzzles made for friends and family on this page,
since in many cases the images are embargoed until they arrive. I'd
like to use the information to get a better feel for the age level and
difficulty of the various puzzles.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Lily and Zoe are Denton's cousins; they're on either side of Denton in age, and since I had no idea as to their likely puzzling level, I aimed to make one a little harder than Denton could currently do, and the other solidly within Denton's comfort zone.
Monty said that the cutting on this one is a bit uninspired.
Well fooey. 16 pieces, December 2009.
Image Source
This one is the harder one of the pair, mostly due to the lack
of pronounced color areas. 24 pieces.
Image Source
This puzzle is for Tobin, who's into maps. The area is around his home in Southborough, and I got some 2008 data from MassGIS; it took some effort to extract it from the sid files, but I found the free tools for linux, and prevailed. I think I then fished together 12 big tiffs using gimp, to get the area we wanted.
I think the uniformity of the image nudges it towards being rather hard so I used lots of funky interlocks to make piecing it by shape alone rather easier.
25 pieces; February 2010.
Image Source
Lily is quite talented at puzzles, and at just-5 was up for the same level of puzzle as Denton is doing.
117 pieces; May 2011.
Image: Breaching Humpback Whale, by Amanda, used with permission.
Zoe wanted a zebra.
Denton had had a zebra thing when I was first making him puzzles,
and I got permission to use the image, then botched the cutting, and
by the time I picked things up to try again, he was more fickle on
the subject. I was delighted that Zoe wanted one.
Image: Mountain Zebra by Debbi O'Sullivan
