Jigsaw Puzzles

For a week or so after Christmas, we work several jigsaw puzzles as a way to relax and wind down after a hectic holiday season. Usually, we complete about five during that time. This year, though, we've done only two so far, because one of them was a real challenger...a couple of white seal pups on a landscape of snow and ice, with a blue sky above. Seven hundred and fifty pieces of varying shades of white and blue takes some concentration.

Our approach to jigsaw puzzles is to sort the puzzle first, separating out the straight-edge border pieces, and laying the other pieces, face up, in several flat boxes or lids. Then we complete the border.

After that, we each use our own method for puzzle construction. Mother's is to find a space on the border that she thinks will be easiest to find pieces for, and then methodically try pieces until she finds ones that will fit.

My favorite approach is to gather pieces I think will fit together to form an obvious part of the motif...a face, a fence, a barn door, etc. Once a part is complete, I place it within the border in the approximate place it belongs and work around it.

Generally, I'm assigned to complete areas such as the sky, the sand, the pine trees, and so on, because the subtle variations of colors in these places are hard for 85-year-old Mother to distinguish.

When working in a same-color area like blue or black, I use two methods...looking for distinctive shapes and subtle changes in hue, or, like Mother, simply trying every piece of that color in the space until I find the one that fits.

Mother is more patient at working jigsaws than I am. She can happily sit for hours at a stretch, trying piece after puzzle piece in the space she has chosen. I, on the other hand, am a sporatic puzzler. I spend 30 minutes or so at it, until I get stumped and unable to locate pieces, and then I jump up to do other tasks like putting a load of clothes in the washer, or answering e-mail, or programming the DVR. Then I return to the puzzle, eyes rested, and work successfully for another 30 minutes or so.

Sometimes, I get stumped no matter what. All the likely pieces for a puzzle section are before me, but none seem to work. So I scrounge through the boxes trying to find more. When I find that there are no more, I resign myself to using what's in front of me. Oddly, at that point the pieces (which I've thought I've tried a hundred times before) start falling right into place.

Between the two of us...patient, methodical, organized Mother, and semi-organized, sporatic, easily-discouraged me...we manage to complete fairly complicated puzzles in a day or two. Hubbie doesn't join in. He has absolutely no patience for puzzles.