The ladies down at the Senior Center like to put jigsaw puzzles together while sitting around and visiting.
Most of them when completed are taken apart and put back into the box to redo at a later date.
Once in a while, they get one they really like so they glue it to a foam backer board and ask me to make a frame for it.
This one is one that I really liked also. Most of the puzzles when assembled are in the form of a rectangle which makes it fairly easy to frame, but sometimes they end up in a different shape like this one that ended up in the shape of the United States. So, I had to fill in the background between the shape of the puzzle and the rectangular frame.
What I came up with was make the fill area 12 sections of Oak plywood with each section cut as a 30 degree wedge with the sides of the wedges converging at a point that is at the center of the puzzle. Since it was already glued to the foam backer board, I had to take some additional steps. I first cut the backer board flush with the puzzle shape and then placed it on a large piece of cardboard and traced the outline onto the cardboard.
Next, I cut away the first 3/4" of the backer board all the way around taking care not to cut into the puzzle. I then took the cardboard with the outline tracing and added a second line that was 1/2" inside the traced line. This second line was what I used as the shape to cut the inside profile of each of the 12 background wedges. This allowed the puzzle shape to overlap on to the background pieces. The thickness of the background wedges was the same as the foam backer board. I then glued the puzzle and the background wedges on to a 1/8" thick piece of hardboard for total support for all of the components. This gave me an overall rectangle to frame.
The ladies all liked it and gave it back to me to take home. I welcome any and all comments, both pro and con. It was a lot of work to frame a puzzle, but I think it was worth the effort.
There is a fine line between woodworking and insanity - sometimes I am not sure which side of the line I am on.
