We were contacted by a medical agency in New York City and asked if we could create a giant jigsaw puzzle for their up coming convention in Las Vegas. When I say giant, I mean 16' - 20'. They wanted something they could put together on the floor and than hoist it up onto a wall to display.

There was a lot to think about, like HOW can it be done? You can not take a 16' - 20' piece of wood ( they don't make something that big) and cut it up with your saw. Wood would be to heavy to hang on a wall, where are you going to get a picture that big of their logo to mount to the wood? Did I mention this was a 16 foot by 20 foot jigsaw puzzle?

500 pieces, close to 2,000 stack cuts, since each piece was cut by hand there were not two pieces the same, even though we used a template for the design the pieces were not interchangeable, each piece could only go in one spot.

The next challenge was how to get the logo on to the puzzle. We decided to hand paint it ! We did not have a room 16' - 20' so we worked in sections.

We could not let the pieces dry together as they would adhere to each other, so we made a clothesline to hang each piece from. we needed to put on two coats, so we did this twice.

We placed an order to have a special canvas made. We were going to velcro the back of each piece and it would stick to it's mate on the canvas. The night before the canvas was suppose to be ready we got a call saying they could not make the canvas after all. The next day (after very little sleep) I got on the telephone with a great company www.americancanvasproducts.com out of Kingston NH, who assured me they could make the canvas that day. We jumped into our truck and headed to Kingston about 2 hours away. When we arrived it was ready! Excellent customer service.

We needed to snap a chalk line to line up where the velcro backs were going to go.

Thanks to our local Shaker Museum, www.shakermuseum.org we finally had a space large enough to put the puzzle together and to make sure it all fit together like a glove. It did!! In the top picture we lifted up the puzzle enough to make sure it could be done.

We packed the pieces in bundles of 25 as that was one complete row, and packed three bundles per box. We wrapped the canvas and wrapped the metal pole we had special made for this project, to slide through a pocket on the top of the canvas ,to be hoisted onto the wall, and shipped it all to Las Vegas.

The thing I haven't shared until this point was we did this all in two (2) weeks. We worked 18 hour days, seven days a week for our clients to finish in time for their convention.

We will share more photos from the convention as we get them.