Jigsaw puzzles

I just finished my first jigsaw puzzle in more than 2½ years.

A von Ballmoos Christmas tradition is to put together a jigsaw puzzle. The putting-together of it borders on obsession and we stay up ridiculously late, straining our eyes in the dim winter light and ignoring the telephone.

I got started a bit late this year, but still managed to strain my eyes and go to sleep very, very late.

2023: NY Public Library

This one started off relatively straightforward, but the final ¼ or so was quite hairy because all of the pieces were more-or-less white. It became a slog of picking up a unique-looking piece and looking at the reference image until I was able to see where it should go. I following this course of action:

1. Spill out all of the pieces
2. Flip everything right-side up, filtering edges and unique-looking pieces (e.g., pieces with yellow, red, and green on them, in this case)
3. Put together as much of the border as I can
4. Put together taxis (red and yellow pieces)
5. Discover that the blue sky pieces are unique enough to sort out and do those
6. Pick up a unique-looking piece, look at the reference image until I was able to see where it should go, hope that it goes somewhere where it attaches
7. Once pattern-matching stopped working, I sorted the remaining pieces by shape and orientation, then worked on matching those to gaps in the puzzle
8. With only forty or fifty pieces left, the task was manageable enough that I could once again start pattern-matching, mixing with shape- and orientation-matching
9. The last ten pieces were a breeze. 🙃

All pieces right-side-up and edge pieces sorted (25 minutes):

Frame, taxis, and sky almost done (~2.5 hours)

There were no more pictures here because I think I went into a bit of a fugue state. If we want to be generous, we’ll call it “flow”. I finally managed to stop at 01:45 and go to bed. I was up at 08:30 to finish it up.

Almost finished; remaining pieces sorted (~6.75 hours)

Finished (~8 hours)

2020: Mordillo

This puzzle was pretty easy to knock off quickly because of the absolute riot of color and very few repeating patterns. It’s beautiful, but wasn’t painful.

2020: Boston

This puzzle was harder than Mordillo, but also had enough variation in pattern, color, and shape to make it fun and challenging.

2014: New York City skyline

Quoting from the album picture, Finally finished the purple/blue sky,

“Do those blue pieces all look the same color to you? Like about 1/3 of the puzzle? They did to me too as it took me days to finish just the sky, always taking advantage of good morning or afternoon light to sneak in a few pieces. I finally gave up, dragged over the 500-watt halogen lamp from the living room and scorched the shadows and shifting colors away. Two evenings of that and I finished just after the new year had started.”

2008/2009: Silver dollars

Quoting from the journal entry, The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle,

“[…] the kicker with this puzzle is that it’s printed on both sides. With the same picture, just rotated by 90 degrees. With this puzzle, there is no initial stage of flipping pieces over first. There is no flipped-over state; either way is good. Classic puzzling techniques go mostly out the window and you end up taking quite a different tack than normal.”

This really was the hardest jigsaw puzzle I’d ever done. It had 539 pieces and took about 9 hours total.

“This is the point after which I noticed that the entire center portion was upside-down. I pored carefully along the edges of all the pieces until I figured out at exactly which “weld points” it was incorrect. I extracted the chunk so I could rotate it as one piece instead.”