Jiggy piece - Weaselwise (that's me folks!)

Music in purple (using supplied purple ribbon)

Last but not least here's my own piece - another mini-book made using three 3" slide mounts lightly stamped with a music theme and held together with purple ribbon threaded thru holes punched and reinforced with my crop-a-dile (was going to have used the Bind-it-All but got carried away using the purple ribbon as lacing across the cover before punching the holes with it so had to use the crop-a-dile instead lol)

The backing paper was sponged over with purple distress ink and again the book is held onto the jigsaw piece with a length of purple organza ribbon. The guitar embellishment on the cover of the book is actually a metal key-fob which my fella found for me and goes perfectly with the book, which contains several pictures of my friend Pete Gale, the extremely talented guitarist from 'Hair of the Dog' and 'Galeforce' who died in January this year, and the piece is my tribute to him.

I've supplied everyone in my group a chunk of the same thin purple ribbon so its going to be very interesting to get my completed jigsaw back and see how my teamies have interpreted my theme.

Jiggy piece - Kikimama23

Space...

... the final frontier... not exactly what Chrissy had in mind, she meant astronomy, nebulae, comets, planets, the moon's surface etc - but every time I thought about this piece the opening theme to Star Trek came flying into my mind...

So I emailed her: 'how do you fancy the Starship Enterprise wombling across the front of your piece?' and her response was that she'd love it as she loved sci-fi - what a result!

In the end I couldn't find a small enough model of the NCC-1701 Enterprise that I liked, so instead went with a slightly converted model of 'Thunderbird 1' which came from my ex-husbands 'Starfleet Battles" miniatures collection...

The title is printed using an old Dymo reel printer as it reminded me of the computer graphics they used in the original Star Trek series.

Jiggy piece - Princess Fiona

Time flies....

My fella came up with part of the idea for this - the winged cardboard clock flying thru a smashed acetate clockface.

The backing paper is from a sheet with loads of expressions and comments about 'time' but in hindsight its not translating as well as it could have done - I did have a piece of paper printed with clocks and watch faces but it was just that little bit too small!

Jiggy piece - Aliblack

Birds

... no Disney or cutesy... so this is as far away from that as I could think! Another mini-book made using the Bind-It-All, but this time I was able to actually use the jigsaw piece itself as the back cover to the book and bind it along with the front cover and the pages inside.

The mini book contains the poem 'The Raven' by Edgar Allen Poe which I love (altho I can't get over the mental image of Homer Simpson enacting the part for a 'Simpsons Treehouse of Horror' episode, in which James Earl Jones narrated the poem and Bart Simpson chimed in with all the "Nevermore" 's...)

The picture on the cover is from Crafty Individuals, it isn't a raven at all (actually looks more like a blackbird!) but it's kind-of a play on words... I hope Alison likes this - she did say that she would love a poetical feel so she gets 6 pages of poetry!

Jiggy piece - Dragonfly Jane

Forest trees

...more British woodland type trees, nothing exotic like palm trees or decorated like Christmas trees...

This was the last piece I made - in fact I only finished it this morning... for some reason I just couldn't come up with any ideas for what to do with this theme... it sounds 'easy-peasy', I mean just how hard is it to come up with a tree? Obviously very hard... I just couldn't get inspired by anything - and the shape of the piece having 3 'holes' in it just didn't help either. 

A chance email with another lady a few days ago however suddenly sparked something in my poor addled brain however and I dug out a photo I'd taken of a tree (funnily enough taken during a break on an all-day scrapbook crop!) which I printed in black and white, then attacked with alcohol inks in butterscotch and lettuce. The quote is the opening 2 lines of a lovely poem by Joyce Kilmer, and the tree-shaped brad I think just finishes it off nicely.

Jiggy piece - Andern06

Fairytales

...but NO Disney came the request... luckily I have a first edition Grimms Fairytales book in my collection and I love some of the shorter ones, so it was a pleasure to pick three short tales and reprint them into a mini-book (any excuse to use my Bind-It-All!)

I used distress inks on bazzill to make the cover, scrunching and spritzing until I was happy with the effect, then ironed the paper flat. Forgot to put something between the paper and my iron - ever tried to clean distress ink off the base of your iron whilst its still hot?

The emblem on the cover was initially stamped and embossed using distress embossing powder but I didn't like the effect so over-stamped it with black Memories.

To keep things simple the book is attached to the jigsaw piece just by a piece of ribbon, for ease of removal. I thought about magnets but decided ribbon was a much easier way to go!

Jiggy piece - Mel81pop

The Sea

Philippa wanted a jigsaw inspired by a favourite poem of hers entitled 'The Sea' - and it caused me a few sleepness nights trying to work out how to portray this.

I knew I wanted to do something involving a boat and luckily found this little white-metal boat at a model shop in town. I built up a shaker box using double-sided foam tape around a base of hot-melt glue into which I nestled the boat, so that it would sit upright when the jigsaw is put onto the wall. Covered the glue with tiny accent beads and painted the frame in greens and blues, adding some seagulls and seashells.

Jiggy piece - Aristoscrap

Indian/Hindu inspired

This was the first piece I actually made, again a trip to the African shop in Southend because I noted that as well as African they had Indian goods as well. Picked up this lovely necklace and set it onto a rather fetching paper from RICO which had what looked like mehndi patterns on it, which I picked out using a Quickie glue pen and gold Perfect Pearls, finishing off with some embroidered shisha mirrors.

Jiggy piece - Terris Chocolat

African Masks/Abstract fur prints in black/white/orange and chocolate

This caused me a bit of a headache to begin with - I don't know a lot about African masks and when Terri posted that she didn't like the 'Bet Lynch' kind of fur print I had to put my patchwork fabric collection away...

However there's a rather nice shop in Southend called 'The Africa Centre' and after a good browse around there I came up with these miniature carved masks.

Some animal print paper and a bit of distress inking around the edges later and I'm rather pleased with this - hope Terri is too!

Arty Farty Jigsaw Swap

On one of the online forums a few months ago, there was a discussion about a swap that was done last year called The Arty Farty Jigsaw Swap and the completed jigsaws that I saw were stunning pieces of artwork. The deal was that groups of 9 ladies decided on a theme each and then using a blank 12x12" chipboard jigsaw made one piece in their own theme, and the other 8 pieces were the themes of the other 8 people. The pieces were sent to the swap organiser who juggled them all up so that everyone received a completed jigsaw back in their theme, with 1 piece made by them and the other 8 made by other people. "Sounds complicated" I thought - and promptly signed up for it... So thats where I've been for the last 2 months - tearing my hair out over making 9 jigsaw pieces each in a totally different theme - I'm surprised I'm not bald! This is how it all started - 9 chipboard pieces covered in gesso so that they'd take paint better...

And this is my completed jigsaw before posting it off to the organiser...

"Never again!!!" I screamed........ and promptly signed up for the 8x8" jigsaw swap starting when this one is fully completed...

Individual jigsaw piece pics will follow in due course...