Page 4 - Elephant Puzzle

For the elephant puzzle (which I got from Made by Me, Shared with You), I started with my ever loyal Word outline. I separated the ovals, circles, cylinders and other shapes I used to create my elephant in Word (which I thought turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself), printed and then cut out the shapes for my stencils. I used the stencils to cut the gray felt used for the elephant and then glued them together to a purple piece of felt. After putting the elephant together, I decided it needed a little bit more, so I made a felt sun and flower to add to the puzzle. I used the sewing glue to put the elephant, flower and sun together first. I decided to cut the piece into squares before I sewed the pieces together. I am new to this sewing thing, so I didn’t want to sew it together first and then cut through my stitches and have them unravel later. I decided on only a 4 piece puzzle to keep it simple for both Ayven and me.

I stitched a blue piece of felt the same size as the puzzle pieces onto the book page. Then I stitched the Velcro onto the blue felt. I matched the Velcro pieces together then pressed the puzzle pieces down to match the puzzle’s Velcro piece exactly with the background’s piece. I didn’t want the Velcro not to match together. (I used Velcro stickers because that was the only thing I could find in the Wal-mart I first went to. The second Wal-mart I tried later had sewing Velcro which would have been my first choice on this project.) Finally, I hot glued googly eyes to the elephant. One more learning experience: googly eyes will melt if the glue is too hot.

Looking back, I should have made the puzzle pieces thicker than just one piece of felt for two reasons. 1) It would be harder to tear up. 2) I was unable to sew the Velcro onto the puzzle pieces. It would have shown up on the front of the puzzle, and I didn’t want that. So I am pretty sure, I will have to redo this puzzle. But luckily it will be only the puzzle pieces and not the page it is on. When I redo the puzzle, I will update this blog with the new pictures. **UPDATE** I ended up not needing to redo the puzzle. I took 2 pieces of felt and sewed on a new piece of velcro then sewed the pieces onto the puzzle piece. Perfect. :)