Jigsaw puzzles! One thousand piece jigsaw puzzles – whew. It seems like these pastime favorites in this house attract a few people at first, then during “construction” a few other family members chip in and then you have those that simply walk by and just look at it, off to do their own thing. Other times someone comes by and picks up a piece and places it in the right place in the puzzle and moves one. Someone else says “Hey, I was looking for that!”
“I was looking for that”, yeah right. A few days ago my daughter Cezarie and I completed this puzzle seen here. My wife helped at the start.
Our strategy was simple – get the edge pieces and finish in record time. Cezarie did most of the edge. We were able to get the face, the owl, some moon pieces, and put those into position. Building the puzzle generally went from right to left, with mostly the top dark portion getting little attention. Cezarie, being somewhat organized, was working on the next pieces abutting the edges. We spent about a day getting about a quarter of it done.
Some pieces were insanely cut along the edge of a color change, making some searches difficult. Soon the discussion became “Think you’ll want to do this puzzle again?”. Some answers from the younger half of the puzzle team duo was a teenagerish “Probably, well, maybe, probably maybe, not really”. Something like that. I was more on to the thought that I’d make it into part of a summer bonfire out in the yard.
The second day brought the puzzle to conclusion, although it took most of the day and night. The last part to complete was the dark portion from the crown and up a bit and over to the left as vines/branches and morphing into riders on horses. What’s that you say? Riders? Yeah, with flags on poles, beards, torch, and the like – all typical stuff that you CAN’T SEE. Turns out the puzzle is more black in the black ink than the picture on the puzzle box. At the point of finishing the last hundred or two hundred, some fits were simply a guess or a methodical journey to check every piece in a certain spot. Get one in, they all look the same. Seem to come in twos – get two in and then take 10 minutes to find another two. Maddening.
