Tuesday’s Tips: Design Your Own Puzzles
Welcome to Tuesday’s Tips, a weekly IDEA SWAP for moms. I hope that when you drop by The Overflow on Tuesdays, you’ll find a gold-mine of encouragement and creative ideas excavated straight from the sticky trenches of parenthood.
Of course a SWAP wouldn’t be a true exchange without many voices. So, please consider chiming in the discussion and sharing your own great ideas. If you’ve discovered a tried and true trip that has made motherhood a little easier, a little more exciting, or a bit more meaningful, please let me know. Just leave a comment after this post or send me an email (rbruxvoort@iowatelecom.net) so I can share your idea in the next swap! I’d love to feature you on an upcoming Tuesday. Let the digging begin!
Design Your Own Puzzles
Recently, we have been both the creators and the recipients of these marvelously unique “letters.”
Inspired by my friend Sherri’s great idea, we decided to send some “puzzling letters” to a few of our favorite college students. We bought some cheap puzzles and painted over them with acrylic paint. (Be sure to choose a light color since you are creating a blank canvas for the drawing and writing).
When the paint dried, the kids drew their own pictures on the puzzle and wrote their own messages to their chosen friends. Josh just wanted to dictate a lengthy tell-all letter on his pieces, while Hannah mixed both pictures and writing.Once we had finished our correspondence, we pulled apart the pieces, placed them in an envelope, and dropped them in the mail. Before we passed our puzzles off to the postman, however, we added a note explaining the mystery pieces to our chosen recipients.
“Take these little pieces
And fit them together one by one,
Then you will find a message
When your puzzle’s finally done.”
Right after we had dropped these puzzles in the mail, the kids got to be on the receiving end of this fun idea. Over the weekend, they opened a package filled with four homemade puzzles, an unexpected gift from some of their favorite far-away friends.The kids had fun putting their own “letters” together and savoring the specially-designed reminders of their friendships. In fact, those puzzles inspired my whole clan to create another round of puzzling correspondence.
Perhaps you could offer a piece of encouragement this week through the simple gift of a homemade puzzle.
Perhaps you could offer a piece of encouragement this week through the simple gift of a homemade puzzle.
What a fun idea! Glad they got to be on the receiving end, too!
~Robin
Thanks for inspiring this fun 🙂
I LOVE IT! I am so glad that they finally received our puzzles… :)…this momma procrastinates! 🙂