Alphabet Tuesday: J is for Jigsaw

OK, lets keep up the excitement and tension that is Alphabet Tuesday. This week is brought to you by the letter J for Jigsaw (not P for Puzzle).

As an added bonus I am going to also include a little bit about how I managed to actually make a fabric jigsaw, because it took some fiddling as a matter of fact.


There were seven pieces on the original panel, and I had two questions so I would know where my starting point with this project was - Do the pieces shown actually make a real connecting jigsaw if you put them together? How big is the completed jigsaw? So I traced all the pieces onto paper and cut them out and "made" the jigsaw. The answers were, "roughly yes" and "about 10cm square".

So I had my jigsaw size and I knew which fabric I was going to raid my stash for. A piece of fun and probably 1970s farmyard print doona cover! And do you think that a 10cm square covered anything interesting on the farmyard design? No not really, the farmyard was too spread out and I was either getting half a cow and a roosters head, or the barn door and the horse's feet in the puddle in front of it or something silly. I finally decided that the best I could do were these two happy children bouncing on their haystack, pitchforks in hand

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I fused them onto double sided interfacing (being careful not to ignite their haystack) and then traced around the puzzle pieces onto the paper backing of the interfacing. This technique basically formed as a guide and I had to do some freehand drawing over the top to make the pieces look more balanced in size and proportions.

When I was happy with that I cut out the pieces (very carefully!). And then simply peeled off the paper backing to fuse our happy farmers onto their red cotton background.

So you see, this alphabet thing is sometimes not the doddle it looks.

Happy Tuesday to you!