One of my favorite childhood memories is doing jigsaw puzzles with the family. Most of us kids got our start doing the "state puzzle", a wooden puzzle which looked much like this one:
Little did we know we were learning geography and state capitals! Now that I've been to some of these other states, and driven through those LITTLE TINY states in the northeast, I have a new appreciation for the knowledge and perspective we were gaining as we did this puzzle over and over throughout the years.
Being the youngest of seven, I was the beneficiary of many family reunions with older siblings, nieces and nephews, and one of our favorite activities with Mom was doing jigsaws. The card table would come out, we'd pick our favorite puzzle and "one more piece" became our refrain as we struggled to focus our vision and downed our 3rd cup of coffee in an effort to stay awake. There was definitely sleep sacrificed for the goal of getting the puzzle done! I think most of the family will agree that these jigsaw sessions were right up there with Pictionary battles and nut-cracking as favorite evening activities.
When Rick and I got married and had kids, we had an assortment of wooden puzzles for very young children. We had one with numbers, one with letters, and at least one with farm animals like the one to the left. I still remember that every night before we went to bed Rick would be on the family room floor, sorting the pieces and putting the puzzles away. At one year old Brian loved to play with them, but he wasn't so good at putting them together, so Rick did that job, bless his heart! I think it could be one of the reasons that we had smart kids, though. They were doing puzzles from a very young age, and I believe that's good for brain development.
Over the years, we've accumulated our own assortment of puzzles, but we didn't have a regular jigsaw habit until recently. Like many during the pandemic, we discovered that having a jigsaw puzzle going is a good way to spend quality time with family or alone, especially during inclement weather when we can't be outdoors. Apparently jigsaw puzzles have become very big lately, as summarized by this article.
It's been a debate among our family whether the "puzzle habit" is worth picking up if we can't have the fun of doing them together, but I've decided that it's a good thing to do at our house. I find I enjoy doing it a little here and there as a "fill-in" while waiting to start dinner or leave for an appointment, Rick and I work on them together and find it entertaining, and the kids stop by and put in a piece now and then. It's not the same as the "get it all done in a night" or a weekend like the Appling family tradition, but I find it's a different, calmer sort of pasttime.
Why Puzzle?
Puzzling also has huge benefits that I wasn't aware of until I started preparing for this blog.
You probably know this already, but the quality of family time while puzzling or playing a game is better then while watching TV or a movie or being together on your phones. As this article about the benefits of puzzling says "Puzzling is perfect for people who want a break from the bustle and unrelenting stimulus of today's digital lifestyle."
It's also a good way to improve your short-term memory. I don't know about you but I can definitely use help with that! And your visual-spatial reasoning will improve too, making it easier to do tasks like packing a car, following a map, or learning new dance moves. I never realized it but activities like jigsaw puzzles and crosswords can help us retain the brain power we need to function as we age.
While I have tried to learn to meditate, I can't seem to manage it without falling asleep. Doing a puzzle is it's own form of meditation. Focusing on one thing, without extraneous thoughts entering your mind, is a good way to relieve stress. Even though life in retirement is much less stressful than when I was working, it's still nice to have activities that I can do that feel like a good way to fill downtime. Doesn't this look relaxing?
Tips for Successful Puzzling
One of the things I found very helpful in puzzling more regularly is having a good spot to do it. Since we leave the puzzle up all the time, it needs to be in a space where it won't be in the way or need to be put away. Although they have special puzzle roll-up things and tables, etc that have extra trays that make your puzzle portable, I have found it best to have a table that isn't used for other things.
The table needs to be a good height too. We used our big round coffee table a couple of times but as I get older I find it harder to bend over or sit on the floor for long periods of time. So think about your seating comfort as you pick a spot since you will be sitting there for long periods of time.
The table we use is an antique "draw leaf" like this one. The nice thing about that is that you can expand it as you go. For instance, my last puzzle was 1500 pieces, and I found I needed more room to spread out after I got started. I could easily pop up the other leaf and get the room I needed. A drop leaf table would work as well. My Mom's solution to add space to her card table was to have lots of trays that you could put pieces of a certain color or object you were working on. This made it easier when you had lots of people working on it together, too.
Lighting is really important. We had this same table in our back room in the corner with a lamp on it, but at night it wasn't light enough, and during the day I wasn't in that room so it wasn't as convenient. We needed to move the table last summer when Katelyn had a friend visit and we set up a bed in the corner where the table was. We relocated it in front of the big bay window in the great room. It gets great light there during the day, so that's when I find myself puzzling now. Sometimes I can't wait to get up in the morning, grab my coffee and start working on it!
My family always started by turning over all the pieces and separating the edge pieces
from the rest. If you're really organized you can start sorting by color or pulling out pieces for specific objects as you do that.
Do you look at the box when you do the puzzle??? I always thought that was a good idea, but in doing puzzles with my friend Fran she said when she was growing up that "wasn't allowed". Wow! I don't think I could have ever gotten most of my puzzles completed without that reference. At Thanksgiving we pulled out a puzzle from my Mom's that I hadn't done in awhile. All about chocolate - definitely not a good diet technique! What made this puzzle challenging is the box doesn't match the puzzle! We figured that out partway through and I took this photo once we were done. There was "extra puzzle" outside the picture formed by the box. It made it especially tough to do the border since you had NO REFERENCE. This is the closest I've come to doing a puzzle without looking at the box. I've never seen that before or since!
Another tip I've learned is to set up certain areas of the table to accumulate pieces. The last puzzle I did had endangered species arranged on a map. I did the border first, then the "easy" parts like the compass and the text at the bottom. Then I sorted animals to one size, sorted by color, and the background pieces on the other side, sorted by color. That made it much easier to tackle.
Some people work on the part of the puzzle in the place it will eventually end up, but I usually work on it closer to me, where I can see better. Two cautions, though. 1) Make sure the puzzle is of high enough quality that you can pick up a bunch of pieces once you've put them together and move them. If they crumble, you will need to slide them which is much harder. 2) Don't wait too long to move your almost-complete image to the main body of the puzzle. I find myself looking in vain for pieces that are already part of the completed puzzle!
Some puzzles are MUCH harder to do than others. The most frustrating thing is when there are pieces that have edges that are ALMOST straight but not quite. I find myself trying to fit them on the edge forever. The other thing that I hate is when pieces will go together but they aren't meant to be together. I've learned to look at the corners and make sure that they match up.
If you have parts of the puzzle that are all the same color or pattern, I find it helpful to sort by shape as well as color. I'll literally line up all the pieces that have two "innies" and two "outies" on the opposite sides, or "all 4 outies" etc. It makes it much easier when you are looking for a specific shape on the piece. It also helps, if you are doing a puzzle with someone else, to have consistent terminology. For instance, are they "outies" or "knobs"?
Those are the tips I've learned as it relates to doing puzzles. Here is an article with more if you're interested.
As I was researching facts about jigsaw puzzles I learned some new things. For instance, do you know what a person who loves doing jigsaw puzzles is called? A dissectologist! Yep, I bet you didn't know that, did you? Turns out the original puzzles were made out of maps, and were called "dissected maps" or, as more subjects were used, "dissected puzzles". In the 20th century they were renamed after a jigsaw, the type of saw used to make them. I was also interested to read in this article that jigsaw puzzles really took off during the depression. They were a good source of cheap entertainment, and also some people found employment in making jigsaw puzzles.
Last year our most popular Christmas gift was custom made jigsaw puzzles from a photo. We had bought one a long time ago from Portrait Puzzles (www.PortraitPuzzles.com) and it had a $2 off coupon on the box it came in, so we used them again. I found out something when I ordered one last year, though. I was using a photo someone texted to me, and when you do that you often lose resolution in the photo. When I used that version of the photo, this website wouldn't accept it because it wasn't fine enough resolution. I asked for an emailed copy of the photo and that worked better. There are many sources of custom puzzles now, but I don't think all of them are smart enough to check the resolution of your photo. Having been the recipient of a puzzle made from a photo that was very low quality, I can tell you it makes for a very hard puzzle because each piece is blurry. So if you're going to order a custom puzzle, make sure you're using a high resolution copy of the photo.
One of the other things we've done is to buy jigsaw puzzles as souveniers when we're on a trip. We have a great long one from our trip to Wyoming of the Grand Tetons, and Katelyn and I bought one from Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany when on our girl's trip to Europe. When the pandemic hit she asked me to send her things to do while stuck inside, so I sent her that puzzle (I took a photo of the box top and sent the puzzle pieces with the photo instead of sending the whole box) in a care package along with books, magazines, jewelry making supplies, a cross-stitch and embroidery project, and lots of chocolate!
I will wrap this up with a gallery with a few of the puzzles we've done lately. The first one was bought in Mendocino on our first trip after the pandemic started. The subject matter just seemed so appropriate for 2020, don't you agree?
Hopefully I've convinced you to keep jigsaw puzzles in your life! I have found that some people exchange puzzles with each other, so hopefully you have friends who like to do puzzles too. If so, invite them over or offer to swap puzzles with them. Even if we can't be together very often for family reunions, we can still share the joy of puzzling in other ways.
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