Alphabet 2020: J is for Jigsaws

Way back at the beginning of social isolation our Prime Minister had just announced that we should only be leaving the house for essential items which he helped to define by saying the following

I will give you an example. Our kids are at home now, as are most kids, and Jenny went out yesterday and bought them a whole bunch of jigsaw puzzles.

Now, of course we all laughed at him because....essential....but you know, we have ended up doing a couple of jigsaws during this period of social isolation. I haven't done a jigsaw for years, so maybe this was the not so subliminal reminder to do one.

It turned out that my husband had a couple of jigsaws that he had owned for years, so he went out to the shed and found them and we started one.

The first jigsaw that we did was an Alfred Hitchcock mystery puzzle. You open the box and there is a pamphlet inside which sets a mystery scene because the twist is that the picture on the box does not represent what the completed puzzle would look like which makes it challenging. The picture is  also the answer to the question of whodunnit! So I guess it is probably best not to share the picture here but it is on my Insta here if you are curious!

The second one we completed was one that I saw on Facebook and bought even though it looked super hard. It turns out that it wasn't really that difficult because you can build from the outside and then from the inside. Because there are almost colour blocks it is possible to sort all the colours and do section by section.

I was intending to do a puzzle this week but when we reorganised our spare room to create a temporary office space the tin got moved and now I have no idea where it is. When I do find it, I am looking forward to doing it, as it is a picture of us at the Top of the Rock in New York that my sister had made into a puzzle and gave it to us for Christmas! It's such a lovely present idea.

The thing that we have discovered, like many others, is that there are so many amazing options out there for puzzles!


Do you want a puzzle on a theme?  Books would be a cool theme right (available here!)

A shaped puzzle?  I love the look of these seahorse shaped puzzles like this one!

A huge puzzle? How about 51300 pieces? It ends up being 8.6 metres by 2 metres so we don't even have a table big enough to do the whole thing! It's even sold out which is impressive given that it cost more than $400!

We don't have any of these on their way to us but we do have four puzzles on their way. One is all about different landmarks around the world and the others are all magic puzzles that we found on Kickstarter. We'll see what that actually means when we receive them.

And what did I learn about my husband in our puzzling? One, he is very logical (which I did already know). Two, he can't have the incomplete jigsaw sitting on the table for very long as every time he walks past he has to put some pieces in, which is a bit of a distraction when you are working from home. The final thing is once a jigsaw is done, it is done, done, done. It might stay there for a couple of days but then it is all packed up, and even passed onto some other puzzler to do! Never to see light of day in our house again apparently!

Will we continue doing puzzles when this thing is all over? Most likely! Maybe I will go buy one of those seahorse ones before I go to bed.