Shades of Grey

Besides LEGOs and furniture, I also assemble jigsaw puzzles at moderate to fast speeds. Recently, I’ve been getting my puzzles from the library book shop for $2, but occasionally people let me borrow puzzles, or, in one case, recruit me to help them finish a puzzle. The kinds of puzzles I buy are usually landscapes, but I also have a Hobbit puzzle, cupcakes, beer logos, and 90s pop culture. The kinds of puzzles people lend to me have descriptions like “features thousands of tiny images” and “world’s most difficult.” Case #1: the Dalmatian puzzle.

The summer I spent in Ithaca running all over the place, my friend and I got to talking about how we like puzzles. She mentioned that she had picked up a puzzle at the Salvation Army store that seemed like a challenge and handed it over to me to assemble. The puzzle had (only) 500 pieces. However, it was also double-sided, with the image on the back rotated 90 degrees; the picture featured hundreds of one-inch tall Dalmatians; and the pieces were cut in one direction, then the puzzle was flipped and rotated to make the cuts in the other direction so there was no way to tell which side was the top or bottom. I normally finish 1000-piece puzzles in about three days working a couple hours a day. Excessive sky or other monochromatic patches might add a day or two. The Dalmatian puzzle took months of periodic work. After I finished, it sat on the coffee table until I moved because I wanted to admire my work.

The Dalmatian puzzle

The following summer was the summer before I started grad school, which I spent mainly sprawled on the carpet in my 80-degree living room. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, I discovered the library book shop, which sells puzzles for $1 or $2, depending on whether they know if all the pieces are there or not. I built up my local puzzle collection and enjoyed several months of mountains, the Las Vegas strip, and a dragon.

Then this past summer, I was staying in temporary lodging between leases when I was informed of a puzzle that a family from church had been working on. They were having a busy summer, though, and hadn’t made much progress. I said I was up for the challenge, and got myself invited over for dinner and a jigsaw puzzle. After taco salad and ice cream, I took a look at what I had gotten myself into. Case #2: the Michigan Stadium, filled with 100,000 millimeter-scale fans all dressed in blue and yellow. As far as difficult puzzles go, it wasn’t horrible, but one pencil-tip-sized fan looks pretty much like all the other pencil-tip-sized fans. It took several puzzle fixing sessions, but I got it done (with a little help from some elementary school kids). [No picture, but this is the puzzle.]

Not long after that, another family from church allowed me the privilege of borrowing a puzzle they’d had for over twenty years and had never completed. Why? Case #3: the mosaic Lincoln puzzle. When complete, the picture was a portrait of Lincoln, composed of hundreds of smaller pictures, all in black and white. I’m sensing a theme here. This puzzle occupied me for several weeks at an awfulness level slightly less than the Dalmatian puzzle.

Lincoln's face as a mosaic.  The puzzle came missing the edge pieces;

I was not responsible for that.

Moral of the story: send me all your undone black and white puzzles of potatoes, or top hats, or lima beans, or whatever. I might solve them, or I might burn them.