Puzzle Photo Pages

Got the scrapbooking doldrums that often come with winter? Are all your pages starting to look the same? Create the new rage! Puzzle photo pages like these two above are a visual treat for the album of your choice. Of course you can get puzzle templates from your local or online scrapbooking supplier. I decided to do mine the budget-minded way. If you have an 8 piece children's puzzle around the house or buy one for about $1.25, you can do this page in about one hour with the following materials:

a children's 8 piece puzzle,

eight photos,

a black Zig Writer pen,

background paper,

and a scissors

(image puzzle1) (image Puzzle2) (image Puzzle3)

Let's go through the process together.

1) First we will pick out the photos. As you can see this puzzle style page works with people like in the Lake page above. It also can work with groups of simular objects like the Portland Rose Garden page. Just gather eight photos with a simular subject matter. This style page works best with photos that are mainly longer horizontally than they are tall. If you are choosing people photos, the ones where the people are about 5 to 10 feet away from the photographer when the pictures were snapped work best. This is a great opportunity to use up some of those pictures that are NOT facial close ups but you still want to use them in your album.

2) Second, we take the children's puzzle apart piece by piece and number the puzzle pieces both in the tray and on the back of the puzzle cardboard piece. Now it may seem silly to do this as it is only an 8 piece puzzle and you are sure you can handle such a simple puzzle as if it were child's play. But humor me (and you will be glad you did) by labeling the pieces. We don't want this to be frustrating for you once you start cutting photos up and forget if you have already done piece 3!

3) Take piece number 1 and a photo and line the puzzle piece over the part of the photo that you want to be in the layout. You will be covering up the 'good' part with the puzzle piece and then tracing around it closely with the thin end of your black Zig marker. Try to get as close to the puzzle as possible when tracing so that you will get a more acurate fit of the pieces on final assembly.

4) Cut out the traced shape. Stay on top of or just a hair inside the drawn black line, not outside it. Slow down and cut accurately and that care will show later on. You should now have a puzzle piece that is shaped just like the puzzle piece number 1 from the children's puzzle.

5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 here until you have all 8 puzzle shapes cut from your photos. At this point, you are done with the children's puzzle and can set it aside (or back in the toy box!)

6) Place each piece in its correct position on a piece of 8.5x11 mat paper. Now use a small amount of adhesive (repositionable is best) on the back of each photo puzzle piece. I used white in the Rose Garden layout and blue on the Lake page. Get the pieces as close to each other as you can. When you have them where you want them, add more adhesive to keep the pieces in place securely for the next step. Don't worry if you see hairline places where the underlying mat shows through between pieces that don't match up perfectly. We will fix those in a minute.

7) Trim the mat around the layout to the width you prefer. I used about 1/3 inch all around on mine. You can use a decorative scissors as I did on the Rose page or a straight edge scissors like on the Lake page.

8.) Use the black Zig Writer and outline the outer edges of each photo in the photo puzzle layout. Use the marker's bullet (wide) tip. If you neatly outline each photo piece, it will cover any mat that might show through between pictures from Step 6. The black outlining hides these hairline mistakes that are inevitable in cutting by hand. The outlining also lends the whole layout a more finished and unified look.

Pep up those ho-hum scrapbooking winter blues with a puzzle page this week! As you can see, it is not much harder than assembling a child's puzzle! I hope you'll try this style of page soon! Go for it! You'll be glad you did!