"Back to School" for Littles Part 3

Puzzles!
I love puzzles, and I seemed to have passed it on to Mackay. He has a handful of wooden puzzles; three are from Grandma, and my lovely Aunt thought of us when she had a chance to pick up some puzzles from her kids' Montessori school.

So when I was at East Idaho's Biggest Garage Sale I kept my eyes peeled for more wooden puzzles. The hardest part is finding ones with all the pieces! At the end of the day I had picked up a number puzzle for about $1. It wasn't in great condition, the stickers were peeling off the numbers, and it was pretty dirty. 

Undaunted, I set to work to make the puzzle nice again. Here's the sad part. I can't find any of my before and during pictures! What I did is pretty basic. I started out with baby wipes, which got the dirt off. Then I sanded the whole thing, aside from the grooves where the pieces sit. It took a really long time to sand the stickers off the top of the puzzle pieces, but it was definitely worth the work! 

I recovered the puzzle pieces with scrapbook paper from The Guy Stack and the All About Boys Stack (the same stack I used for his notebook). It took just a little modge podge and then I re-sanded around the edges of the numbers to give them a smooth finish.

I used a few layers of acrylic paint (by a few I mean 10+) to cover up the weird pictures that were in the number grooves. If I had been smart, I would have started with one layer of black, then hopefully one layer of white and one of red. Instead, I did about 8 layers of white and 2 of red (and you can still see the pictures if you look hard enough).

Mack was really excited to get a new puzzle.

He's really into counting things lately, so this is perfect.

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