Puzzle Boxes

With school holidays, wet weather and children stuck inside, The Room, Vic continues to be quiet (too busy rotating washing on clothes horses and trying to cut off the escape routes as my cabin-fevered boys try to play in the rain).... fortunately, creativity continues on the other side of the country... 

I recently bought the kids some new puzzles.  The boxes came with 8 puzzles in each.  When I opened them up at home, I was disappointed to find that each puzzle was simply in a plastic bag with a paper picture included.  Anyone with young kids will know that this is a potential disaster for mixed up puzzle pieces and torn pictures.  What to do?  I decided to make some boxes to go inside the boxes...of course.

Using a template I already had, I traced out 16 boxes!

Then I cut out 16 boxes!  (Wasn’t too bad as I did it in front of the t.v one night after the kids were asleep...helped keep me awake.)

Scored 16 boxes!

And stuck together 16 boxes!  But I wasn’t finished there.

Each box needed the picture on the front so that you could see what you were making, but I also wrote how many pieces were in each one.  I thought of just sticking them on, but my kids are puzzle lovers (especially my son) and I thought that after awhile the paper would get torn (one already was).  So out came one of my favourite things!  ‘The Laminator’  This little baby gets a workout in our house.  Everything from laminating school certificates for posterity, to laminating pictures to go on the kids toy boxes so they can pack up easily.

So some laminating later, with a bit of adhesive and I was left with this!  The kids haven’t stopped playing with their puzzles since (and anything that isn’t tv in this house is good) and most evenings or mornings can be found sitting in front of the heater doing them.

I spread this over 2 days and it wasn’t too bad.  A little time consuming, but if I did it while watching t.v at night or when having a cuppa it went by fairly fast.