Jigsaw puzzles remind me of wrestling with angels. Remember Joseph wrestling with the angel all night and saying, no, screaming, "I will not let you go until you bless me!"?
Spanish for puzzles is rompecabezas, literally, "head breakers." It's like trying to beat yourself at a game of solitaire. It seems stupid to sweat over putting 750 pieces of a watercolor together, when I could paint one from scratch in less time by far. I know, puzzles are good for your brain, help grow more gray matter and make new neural connection. Yeah, yeah.
In that vein, my initial strategy is to segregate the pieces by color and the straight edges to complete the frame. Then, you have to deal with the tricky stuff, like the three different bunches of roses, or the two identical blue and white pots of different sizes. Or the four different, no five different splashes of yellow. This assumes you don't have one of those puzzles that is a field of wheat, autumn leaves or jelly beans. That's for the advanced players.
Then there is the matter of shape. I think of the pieces as either fours, fives or sixes. The sixes look like angels or butterflies, the fives look more like people with a head, two arms and two legs. Some of the fives also have their gender indicated. A nonconformist is obvious when its space opens up, but those pieces are often not interlocking, especially when not simply weird but shaped like birds, baskets, watering can, tulips or butterflies.
No surprise, the biggest frustration is to get to the end and not have all the pieces, which, unless you count all 750 at the beginning, you aren't going to know until the end. (Is this another covert Life Lesson being sprung?)
My internal conversation while puzzling, should it by misfortune be put on audio, might sound like a football coach or perhaps a Cold War strategist. Man, these jigsaw puzzles are not for sissies.
The surprise comes when my hand picks up a piece and puts it in the right space with no thought or conversation. In the Zone. That's an instant of grace.
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| "Flower Cupboard" by Janet Kruscamp |
Spanish for puzzles is rompecabezas, literally, "head breakers." It's like trying to beat yourself at a game of solitaire. It seems stupid to sweat over putting 750 pieces of a watercolor together, when I could paint one from scratch in less time by far. I know, puzzles are good for your brain, help grow more gray matter and make new neural connection. Yeah, yeah.
In that vein, my initial strategy is to segregate the pieces by color and the straight edges to complete the frame. Then, you have to deal with the tricky stuff, like the three different bunches of roses, or the two identical blue and white pots of different sizes. Or the four different, no five different splashes of yellow. This assumes you don't have one of those puzzles that is a field of wheat, autumn leaves or jelly beans. That's for the advanced players.
Then there is the matter of shape. I think of the pieces as either fours, fives or sixes. The sixes look like angels or butterflies, the fives look more like people with a head, two arms and two legs. Some of the fives also have their gender indicated. A nonconformist is obvious when its space opens up, but those pieces are often not interlocking, especially when not simply weird but shaped like birds, baskets, watering can, tulips or butterflies.
No surprise, the biggest frustration is to get to the end and not have all the pieces, which, unless you count all 750 at the beginning, you aren't going to know until the end. (Is this another covert Life Lesson being sprung?)
My internal conversation while puzzling, should it by misfortune be put on audio, might sound like a football coach or perhaps a Cold War strategist. Man, these jigsaw puzzles are not for sissies.
The surprise comes when my hand picks up a piece and puts it in the right space with no thought or conversation. In the Zone. That's an instant of grace.