Monday, May 27, 2002
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Puzzling behavior
I bought a couple of jigsaw puzzles this past week at the thrift store. Everyone with a lick of sense knows that buying jigsaw puzzles at a thrift store is just asking for a piece to be missing, but I did it anyway. The puzzles were too intriguing.
The first one was titled "Clandestine Cliches". This was a surprisingly hard puzzle to do for having only 550 pieces, firstly because of the type of art - ink sketch with watercolors. There is a lot of the scratchy scribbly black line stuff, and the range of colors is very small, so it is hard to figure out where stuff goes from one tiny piece. The second difficulty was the shape of the pieces - they are not the usual rectangular grid pieces that one normally finds in a jigsaw puzzle. The shapes ran in all different directions and sizes, and there were straight edge pieces that fell in the middle of the puzzle, not just on the edges. The kids were very easily frustrated, so I had to do over half of it before they would join in finishing it. Surprisingly, it was complete, not missing any pieces. It was fun to try and find all the cliches after it was finished, some more obscure than others. "Raining cats and dogs" was obvious, but I was the only one in my house that realized that the sundial was depicting a "five o'clock shadow". I think I will mail this one to my mother. She normal only does ones with 1000 pieces or more, but she might have fun with this one.
The second puzzle is currently in progress on my air hockey table (yeah, it gets in the way of playing air hockey, but that's just motivation to get it done faster). It is a confounding Esheresque collage of various parts of buildings called "The Improper City". Don't ask me why I can't just buy a pleasant pastoral or a photo of kittens playing under a vase of flowers.
I would never decorate in jigsaw puzzles. As much as I love the art in a good puzzle, I don't think the cut lines add anything to its artistic value. I will say that I have developed a great fondness for the works of Charles Wysocki, just because I love jigsaw puzzles done from his paintings. Maybe I need to find some for my new home that don't have wiggly cuts in them.
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Comments (2)
This is something we used to do a lot when I was a kid. Every Christmas we would always get lots of puzzles and we would put them together on the card table. When my aunt was sick with cancer we used to do puzzles for hours in the hospital.
Puzzles have a lot of memories for me. I got a couple this year and did them on the coffee table. I should get some more.
you just reminded me of the dragon puzzle a friend gave to me which I completed 2 years ago, I want to have it framed but I keep forgetting about it.
It's around 3000 pcs, I think and is lying under my bed right now