Puzzles.

We have often done puzzles - usually around the Christmas/New Year’s holidays. It started when we were in college and would try to finish a puzzle on New Year’s day - and depending on how many of us were working on it, could finish a puzzle in the morning. Of course, that depended on how hard it was - 1000 pieces were the standard size we bought.

Well, my son bought us a 3000 piece puzzle a year ago for Christmas. It’s a big puzzle featuring Jerusalem.

We knew it would be hard so Mike made us a special puzzle table. He made it big enough so that it would hold the puzzle plus a little bit more and 8 drawers to hold pieces. This means we don’t need a dozen old puzzle box tops and bottoms to sort pieces in. He actually didn’t finish the table before the war with Ukraine started last year (Feb. 2022) and just put the whole project on hold until this past December. Then he decided to finish it so we could get going on this puzzle!

I knew this would be a difficult one - and I wanted you to see our progress.

I have considered asking my husband if once we get it done, if we can put this on the wall in my long-arm room - on the left. It will be nice and big and my walls are mostly bare there in that room. Plus, I’m not sure where else we can put it! :) I guess it is obvious that we glue them once they are done and keep them! I suppose if they only took 3 or 4 hours to do, then I wouldn’t…but one like this - becomes a piece of art for our walls somewhere in the house.

Anyway…here is our progress report.

This was Jan. 6, 2023.

The next week went by - and by Jan. 15 we were here.

And that’s where we are now. I’m afraid this is the easiest part of the puzzle. The rest of it is all buildings and dark trees. Oh my. The only good thing is that by doing the part we have, we’ve whittled down the pieces. I am guessing we may be half done. That would be wonderful.

You can see that it is a little bit “in the way” of my laying out my quilt tops when I take photos. I showed this a while ago now when I showed a new top I had finished.

At this point, we were waiting on some stools to use as we had two saw horses for us to put the table on - but they made it too tall for regular chairs. We got them, so then we moved the table to the sawhorses and can work up a bit higher than shown here.

As much as I may get frustrated at how much time a puzzle takes to do - I know the end result of this one is going to be amazing! We used to do more but our wall space is limited, so we aren’t doing as many as we used to. We actually prefer to do ones of places where we’ve been so that we later have a memoir of that place - it is doing double duty. Obviously I have plenty to do and don’t do puzzles because I’m so bored with life that I don’t know what to do! That’s a joke!

if you are reading this and happen to be a non-quilter and do find yourself bored - well, let me encourage you to start quilting. You will find an amazing group of people who are never bored. We always have more projects to do than we have time and we are always on the look out for new friends and opportunities to learn. I mean, seriously - could there be a better bunch to hang out with?

And to morph this blog post to quilting - even though it didn’t start out that way - let me share with you some amazing PUZZLE fabrics that Rachael is carrying in the store right now. I didn’t even realize she had all these until I searched for “puzzle” on the website. (I knew about one or two of them!)

Let me share them with you! I know that jigsaw puzzle pieces have become the motif to represent autism like the pink ribbon is for breast cancer. However, these fabrics can also just represent puzzles!

Check them out! Maybe you could use some in a quilt or project of your own! If you click on the photo, it should take you to the fabric we have.