No more 1000 piece puzzles

[conuly]

If I commit homicide tonight over that puzzle, it's all Ana's fault. She's the one who willfully brought it into the house.

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Comments

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Don't visit us on New Year's Eve then. That's our tradition - make a nice meal, pop the Hootenanny (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootenanny_%28UK_TV_series%29) on and do a 1000 piece jigsaw. Usually doing the whole thing in one night, staying up really late, and then really regretting it when we have to get up for work on the morning of the 2nd! (This year we're both not back to work until the 5th though, woooo! Thursday is the best day for Christmas Day.)

It's a tradition in our family to do a jigsaw in the days after Christmas, especially the years Grandad's with us. When Guido started visiting after/for Christmas, we discovered that he's a total natural at jigsaws despite having not particularly done them growing up. We'll come down in the morning and his eyes just light on a piece which my parents have been struggling to place for hours and instantly see where it should go. It's one of his superpowers. He's passed it to our nephew too, whose skill and enthusiasm for jigsaws unfortunately surpasses their availability for his age group. (I'll never forget watching him do one of his very first jigsaws, a 12 piece one, by turning all the pieces over and putting it together from the grey backs. His mum kept trying to turn them over but he was quite insistent that he wanted to do it that way up. Aaah, two-year-olds.)

[conuly]

Hm. How do you feel about puzzles with no straight edges?

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Never tried one. We are more interested in the picture than taking on ones which are difficult for the sake of it. (A few years ago I found some jigsaws where every piece was an edge piece, but the pictures were saccharine drawings of kittens in farmhouse kitchens etc. Not to our taste.)

We mostly do Wasgij (http://www.wasgij.co.uk/) ones. I don't know if you have them in the US, but the picture on the box isn't what's on the puzzle - you're either making the view seen by one of the people in the picture, or it's what happens next, or we did one last Christmas which was a Diamond Jubilee street party, with the box image having been the Coronation street party 59 years before. We enjoy having the puzzle element on top of the jigsaw itself, rather than simply replicating the picture on the box. When we do do classic ones as a family, they're almost exclusively Ravensburger because the quality and range is so good.

Of course the best jigsaws ever were the Talking Jigsaw Puzzle range. Alas, my family only owns one (and it's the same one that's currently on ebay, bah). All the pieces connected into 2x2 squares which were identically shaped, so could be arranged in any combination. You had to use clues in the pictures, dialogue etc to work out where they should go. So ours was an office building and you'd work out the placement of the rooms by looking at room numbers on office doors, conversations between people in adjacent offices, putting all the toilets on top of each other (because someone somewhere said that, and that they alternate male on one floor, female on the next). The back of the puzzle was printed with "congratulations" over and over in different typefaces, in such a way that only the correct configuration would go together properly. It's such a great concept for a jigsaw and I just can't understand how they're not still in print.