I had a minor disaster with this 2,000 piece puzzle I’ve been working on for over a week. Placing it back on the table from it’s out-of-the-way spot I tilted the board too fast, and too steeply- all the pieces slid off to the floor in an instant. I yelled so loud my husband came running upstairs to see what happened. He said “Oh well, at least some of the pieces are still together.” But it’s the kind of puzzle that has a very loose fit- so it wasn’t a matter of just casually picking up those still-connected pieces. I had to do it very carefully, sliding sections onto a recipe card, to maintain some of the progress I’d had before. All the time available for puzzling this day, was spent just getting the pieces back on the table! Sigh.
Things got better later in the week, puzzle-wise. I went to my public library’s puzzle swap, which is becoming a regular event. I found this one and picked it up thinking: that’s a nice picture. I’m fond of nasturtiums. I thought it caught my eye because several days earlier, I’d seen someone post this same puzzle on an online group I belong to- and agreed with the comments that admired it, but thought nothing more of it.
Now when I was putting the info into my puzzle catalog, which included taking a photo, I looked at it more closely and suddenly had a flash of recognition- I used to own this puzzle! I distinctly recall putting together the purple flowers on the fence, the blue face of broken pottery, the pale pots in one corner and the nasturtium leaves- largest first. It must have been thirty years ago or more- I have clear memories of assembling it on the floor in my bedroom when I was a teenager. Wow. Now I’m delighted to have it again, and just hope that X on the box means someone culled it from a collection, not that it’s missing pieces!
While I was at that puzzle swap, I had another happy moment. The woman who organizes it reminded me of a puzzle I gave last time, that had replacement pieces I’d made. I had asked her if it was okay to bring puzzles with handmade pieces to the swap, because it’s against the rules to bring ones with missing pieces. She said – a bit dubiously- well, let’s see what they look like. So I dumped the puzzle out on a table and picked out the two pieces. Not too hard to find because I knew what pattern they had, and the backs were a different color. She seemed a bit impressed with how well they’d come out.
This time she tells me, Remember that puzzle you brought with the lady in the green dress? one of her friends had taken it home. She didn’t tell her friend about the replacement pieces. Later she saw the puzzle assembled at her friend’s house, and said it looked great all put together! “You couldn’t even tell.” She told me her friend had no idea there were two handmade pieces in that puzzle, hadn’t even noticed. I was tickled pink. “I’m going to keep doing this, then!”
