An Unexpected Gift

     I don't like giving people ordinary things for extraordinary events, if I can help it. For my cousin's son's baptism, I had this brilliant idea in my head to make something meaningful for the day that the kid could actually do something with (as opposed to a nice picture frame, or something to hang on the wall - not bad gifts, but not really a source of fun for baby as he gets older). I came up with the idea to make a peg doll of baby's name saint, since they seem to be all over the internet lately. But when I went to get the wooden dolls to paint, I found something even more useful and fun - a blank puzzle.
     It needs to be said that all my supplies are still packed up and in storage so I had to operate not only on an extreme time crunch ( I had 1.5 hours one night, and 2 hours another night, to design and execute the whole thing) but with very very limited resources. This puzzle isn't as polished or as detailed as I would have liked it to be, but considering what I had to work with it's not terrible.

Because of the time crunch, I didn't even have time to take a decent photo. Pity.
This is a rendition of St. Stephen, first martyr of the Catholic church (hence his red outfit and the palm) and a deacon who was stoned to death (hence the rocks in his hand). I modeled him after both some holy card images I found and also several icon writings of him that I liked.
     For extra fun, JieJie helped me paint the frame of the puzzle. This gave me a little extra time later to put an inscription on the inside, which you can see without the pieces on top of it:

I thought it would be even more fun to do an image of Eomer from Lord of the Rings (baby's middle name) on the flip side of the puzzle pieces but alas, I ran out of time.
     His older siblings really enjoyed playing with this puzzle so I hope once he gets old enough to play, he will too!

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