A rediscovery this year - for the first time in years, we have room on the dining room table to keep a jigsaw puzzle on the go.
It’s an old family tradition for me, one that we let lapse for a long time - we get a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and it is supposed to be finished by New Year’s Day. Something about having a large puzzle that everyone can contribute a bit to from time to time helped the rambling conversations.
So this year, the kids and I got a 300 piece puzzle of ‘On the Savannah’ on New Year’s Eve, and finished it before midnight. We enjoyed that so much, we started a 1000 piece puzzle of two pages of ‘a score for string quartet’ the next day. I mentioned it to my daughter’s piano teacher, who promptly loaned us a 1000 piece puzzle of ‘The Instruments of the Orchestra’. Now that this one’s almost finished, I’m actually thinking I’m going to go off and get another one sometime today or tomorrow…
Yes, I’m officially old and a geek and I just don’t care. There’s nothing like it for a relaxing engagement of just enough brain cells.
I went through a jigsaw puzzle period many years ago. After doing many of them I finally got bored, so started mixing pieces of several puzzles together. That way, before you can decide where a piece goes, you first have to decide which puzzle it’s for.
When that got to be boring, I started putting them together face-down. That’s when true insanity takes over.
By the way, for those of us of a certain age . . . to help keep both hemispheres of your brain functioning, it’s recommended that you do both jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles.
I love jigsaw puzzles. My brother and I always got a couple for Christmas when we were kids and would do them together in the following weeks. Fights ensued because he was methodical and preferred to set out all the pieces on the table, face-up, with the edge pieces separated. I wanted to dive straight into the box and have at it. I also had a habit stealing one piece of the puzzle so when the jigsaw was done I got to put in the last piece… yeah, little sisters are annoying.
At the moment my flat doesn’t have a clear, flat surface to do jigsaws on (the dining table has become storage for various electronics and books) so it’s been a few years since I last completed one. You’ve inspired me to do a clear out this week to make that space available!
I have been dropping hints for ages that I would like a 3D Puzzle Ball for my 24th birthday at the end of the week. Alas, nobody has been taking the hints seriously because what 24-year-old wants a jigsaw puzzle as a birthday gift? Bah.
A jigsaw puzzle was also a part of my family’s Christmas tradition. After the big meal, and after the gifts it was something to do together and allowed lapses in conversation not to be awkward.
I did one at home between Thanksgiving and Christmas and really enjoyed it, and treated myself to a few more that I havent’ done yet. I might break one out tonight.
Something I’ve been thinking about is proposing an exchange of jigsaw puzzles here on the boards. It seems there are plenty of us who have them. Would any of you be interested?
You need to get the five thousand piece, complete white(no picture) and it’s a circle, jigsaw puzzle. Then after you complete that you know you have arrived into “elite status”
I was on the Pomegranate website earlier today, and I was quite disappointed to realize that the New York Times Crossword Puzzle Jigsaw Puzzle doesn’t exist. It was just that I was at the end of the Boolean search for Jigsaw+Puzzle, and it started listing postcards with NYC crosswords. I think it’d be really cool to do both at the same time.
All day I’ve been thinking of the film version of ‘Diva’ and the fantastic puzzle that Serge Gorodish is working on throughout the action.
I LOVE my jigsaw puzzles! 1000 piecers are my favorite. (the others get done too quickly.
A few years ago, my daughter got me a program from Best Buy for Christmas. It probably costs under $20, but… (wait for it…)… YOU CAN DO JIGSAW PUZZLES on your computer!!! (claps hands with glee!) I haven’t done a real once since (plus, I don’t have the table space to set up a puzzle. The husband refuses to allow me to use the pool table as a puzzle board. (grrr) You can download TONS of photos from Digital Photography sites and use them as puzzles… sigh… enough talking about this, I have to go and work a few pieces of the puzzle.
My mother always has one on the go at her house. Giving her a new jigsaw puzzle is a standard birthday/Christmas/Mothers’ Day present. Whenever family drop by we always spend a bit of time on the puzzle.
Believe it or not, this sounds easier than the hardest one I ever completed.
It was a circle, it was made up of different color puzzle pieces. That was it. And to make it even more of a pain in the ass, it was cut with a different pattern than the picture of the puzzle piece. The colors did help a bit, but it also made my eyeballs strain from looking at so much color with nothing to break it up.
I love puzzles. I’ll see if I can find a link to one similar to the one I’m talking about.
I’m curious as to the method people use to solve puzzles.
some people build the frame first, and have all of the pieces out of the box, turned right-side-up before really digging in. My method annoyed my family because they never could understand why I did it my way…
all pieces remain in the box. If it hasn’t been placed properly, it isn’t on the table.
I never set out to build the frame first. I don’t know why, but puzzles with a picture are built by focusing on an item in the picture, and building that. It’s sort of like building it from the inside and pushing out toward the frame.
I would spend as much time as I had to to go through the box with my hand dragging through the pieces, turning them over at random until I spotted a piece I needed.
The reason I did it this way was because
space issues as a kid. This basically forced me to keep the pieces in the box, because I didn’t have a table to spread the puzzle out. Now that I have the space, I still keep the pieces in the box.
Keeping the pieces in the box and not focusing on the frame made it a bit more challenging.
I haven’t built a good puzzle in a number of years, but this thread has reinvigorated me.
I think I will go online and try to find a very hard puzzle. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Only one restriction. I don’t like 3-D puzzles. I’m a 2-D fan.
I’ve done that one also, and it was a Springbok one, possibly before they got bought by Hallmark. I might even still have it in a box in our storage area.
I’ve lusted after that one. However, I did a 6,000 piece old map of the world, which took a year and occupied a table in our sun room all that time. My wife is going to divorce me if I start such a big one again before I retire.
I did a thousand-piecer while I was at Mom’s house for Christmas. It was an American flag pattern made up of Campbell’s soup cans (apparently, an old ad from the 19-oughts), and I was worried that all of the identical-looking cans would make the puzzle impossible. But then I noticed that the cans weren’t all the same flavor, and was able to finish it in a total of about 16 hours.
Probably the hardest puzzle I’ve ever done was a Schmuzzle puzzle, where all the pieces are identically-shaped (they’re turtles, based on the shape of the tesselating lizards in Escher’s work). So any piece can fit in any location, it’ll just probably be wrong. Well, one of the Schmuzzle puzzles I have is a picture of a bunch of hot air balloons, which therefore has a ton of sky. The color of the sky varied just enough across the picture that you could tell when you had it wrong, but not really enough to be able to see what the right piece would be before you fitted it. I did eventually finish that one completely and correctly, but I literally used a microscope to do it.
