Untangling Oli

After all the abuse I hurled in his direction in the last post, it's only fair that I even out the scales a bit!

Back at the start of December Oli's flickr-stream showed a pic of some lovely little leather disentanglement puzzles that he'd made - it's a pretty standard design that's been implemented in hundreds of ways - one of them available from Arteludes if you're interested - but Oli's come up with a really simple, effective way to make them ... then he must have run off a whole bunch of them because he was handing them out to everyone he knew at Peter Hajek's End of Year Puzzle Party a couple of weeks ago - and I scored one!

Cheers for that Oli! It's become an instant favourite to show puzzle-muggles.

If you want to make one for yourself, all you need is a piece of leather (or something similarly flexible) - put two slits down most of the length and punch a round hole at one end of those parallel slits, roughly the same diameter as the distance between the slits. Slide two buttons onto a piece of twine and tie knot at the two ends trapping the buttons ... then put a drop of glue on each knot to stop "others" from untying the knots ... et voila! 

Your very own disentanglement puzzle ... once you entangle it, of course!