Jigsaw puzzles aren’t just for children…

 

I would have never discovered jigsaw puzzles as a hobby for myself.  About a year ago, my brother brought one over when he came to visit me. I looked at it, thanked him and was about to put it carefully away, never to be looked at again.  I don’t remember doing jigsaw puzzles as a child, I  know nothing about them and, as I was preparing to abandon it, he started unpacking it and laying out the pieces.  He could always read my mind!!! To cut a long story short, he showed me how to find the border pieces, the bits with the flat sides, and then we were off.  This initial jigsaw was a 300 piece one,  recommended age was 8 years old. That sounded about right for me…..into my second childhood, no less. 

 

After a lot of effort, I finally put it together.  As I started buying the puzzles, I found that it isn’t as easy to source them as you would imagine.  I thought the stationery shops or department stores would stock them.  They did, with a very limited range, and much bigger than I would attempt at this juvenile stage of my jigsawing career.  However, back to Google and I located suppliers on the Net.  Having bought a few and discovered that they were quite expensive, I broadened my horizons to look at the Trademe site, and of course, there were a lot. The charity shops are  also a good source.

 

The only trouble with buying in this way is that you cant tell if the puzzles are  complete or not. The ads for the puzzles on Trademe  nearly always say “all pieces are there”, but it isn’t until you are close to finishing the puzzle that you discover a piece is missing. So far I have been lucky.

 

I don’t do the puzzles more than once, and I then pass them on to someone who will enjoy them.  When I break the puzzle down to put it back in the box, I put all the border pieces in one plastic bag, and the rest in another bag.  Of course, if you want to frame the completed work of art, and some of them are truly beautiful, then you can paint over them with a jigsaw fixative glue and frame them.  Ravensburger have a good range of accessories, and I have always found the Ravensburger and Holdsons puzzles are very enjoyable. 

 

I have progressed to 500 piece puzzles now, but I am not going any further than this,  as I know I don’t have the space to lay them out.

 

I thoroughly recommend this pursuit to exercise your brain and even your fingers, and there also puzzles available for Alzheimer’s sufferers.  These are puzzles with very large pictures of every day objects, which are widely used to jog the memory. 

 

So, good puzzling…….