How often does it happen
to you that you are mesmerized and moved by a jigsaw puzzle, especially when you
are on the verge of graduation or have already passed the hurdle? It does sound childish
right? How can a jigsaw puzzle be even meant for people of this age group? But no,
either this was blissfully creative, or we are elatedly different. Come, let’s
experience!
Sometime in July-August
2010, three of us were roaming in a toy store in Bangalore and our eyes fell on a jigsaw puzzle. We had tried our
hands on a much smaller puzzle some 10 or so years back and the experience was
not so great. But looking at this one, we felt like giving another try to
jigsaws - there was something very attractive and challenging to it & we
ended up purchasing it.
This jigsaw was a
collage of 11 pictures - challenging? No!
It was made up of 5000
pieces - challenging enough? Not yet!
This reminds me of the chicken and pig fable here:
“What is the difference
between involvement and commitment?"
"In preparing a dish like ham-n-eggs, the chicken
is Involved, but the pig is Committed.”
I’m sure we were going to be the pig counterparts here.
The picture had 13
adult tigers and 4 tiger cubs altogether in different
shots in different locations like forest, beach, rocks etc. Ravensberger (the
puzzle company), you beauty! Have a look at it.
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| The puzzle design |
Every damn tile in the
pile looked alike! If seen on a broader scale, all the tiles were either some
shade of green or some shade of brown. Let me give you a small instance of the
challenge we had in front of us. We had a total of 34 tiger eyes cut across at
least 68 jigsaw pieces (we had planned to pick out all these pieces from the pile and make an eye pool, without this kind of sorting the finding a piece from the pile was unthinkable!) and we had no clue
about which eye belongs to which tiger!! And before you forget, this is just
one instance. Just think of the dense green forest in the background.
With this, let’s get
started to assemble the puzzle now. So, some background here - all three of us were working and could only get together over the weekends, precisely Friday evenings to Sunday evenings. So we decided
to keep this as a weekend project only. So rest of that weekend we pretty much
spent in thinking about the strategy we would use to start assembling this
massive puzzle with infinite small pieces - yeah, it did seem like infinite at
that time! STRATEGY!! Sounds like a mission huh? But we had to think of
something as managing that pile was not going to be a piece of cake for sure.
The next weekend, we
started with taking out the border pieces from the pile and assembling those, like
the usual way you approach a jigsaw puzzle. Even the border was quite difficult
to put together because, as you can see, all it had was tiger stripes in brown
and black! Looking at the design also didn't help much. Our eyes were put to
extreme test by trying to match the shades of brown to get some help around
assembling those border pieces. We made a decent progress putting together the
border frame with several pieces missing. We made at least two more passes at
the entire pile of remaining pieces to look for the rest of the border pieces,
but we were unsuccessful and right at the very first weekend of our adventure,
we started thinking that maybe we already lost a few pieces while cleaning the
room or moving the puzzle here and there. But this was too soon to give up. Oh
did I say give up? Ahh, my bad! May be we need to add this in our dictionary.
 |
| Sometimes on the floor |
Leaving them for a while
and to give some relaxation to our eyes, we started sorting the rest of the
pieces according to their type - green potential leaves, blue/white potential
water, blue potential sky, brown potential beach sand and finally the potential
pieces of the tiger’s bodies. All these categories were thought of after
analyzing the chunk of pieces. I think it would be fair to say that the easiest
part in the whole puzzle was the yellow/orange/brown border lines of each of
the 11 picture frames. It was easy to find those pieces since the lines were
thin enough to fit into a single jigsaw piece; also it was easy to assemble
those frames because the shades were fairly easy to spot with some help from
the design box.
 |
| Sometimes on the bed |
Over the new few weekends, we gradually drilled down on each pile of
sorted pieces. We first used to form a sub-section of the surroundings of a
particular picture and when the assemblage became of a decent size, we used to
fit it into the bigger frame that we had put together. It felt nothing short of
a biiiiiig achievement every time we merged some block into our main frame!
Eventually we did find those remaining pieces of the border and were at least
satisfied that we have not lost any of them. We were so much into this puzzle
that we had lost track of time, sleep, hunger... It used to get very late by
the time we used to realize that we should eat something, and then pizza or
maggi used to come to our rescue. It had become a trend for the next few weekends.
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| Pizza to the rescue without losing focus from the pieces! |
We reached a stage where
few of the pictures out of the 11 were almost complete with a hole in place of
the tigers. But the center tiger was yet to be started! So many times it
happened that the piece which seemed like an eye or a tiger’s skin, ended up
being a part of the sun rays or a water droplet. It was extremely confusing to
just look and look and look at a piece and try to make out what could it be in
the giant puzzle.
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| Almost complete corner tigers |
Few weekends later, the
picture finally started to show up... We were almost close to finishing up the
smaller tiger pictures and had not even touched the center one yet! Then one
day taking a long breath, we embarked on that journey... Gradually moving from
the forest and the leaves towards the royal tiger, we finally finished the
puzzle...
Weekends have never been
this busy in our lives. A sense of achievement rushed through us. It was like
taming an unattainable achievement.  |
| The royal tiger in the center... |
A 5000-piece
puzzle was completed much sooner than we ourselves expected, we were on top of the world! And oh
boy, it looked amazing! The puzzle quality was so great that we could just pick
up the puzzle like a sheet from both sides and move it anywhere; the pieces
were well intertwined with each other.
 |
| The completed puzzle! |
This marked a beginning - "jigsaws", which got added
to the list of the arts and crafts we love to do as a family. Over the next few
years, we as a family, have completed a 1000-piece Triptychon of Taj Mahal, a 1000-piece Panorama of the Bay Bridge and a 3000-piece scenery, all by Ravensberger, and we still are totally
crazy about doing many more... It's an amazing art form that involves a lot of
patience, concentration and commitment. It can lead to frustration at times. I
still remember a couple of weekends when we were so depressed as we were not
able to make any significant progress. But as we already told you, we are
crazy, we are different, and we proved to be the ‘pigs’ here, totally committed to
it.
Still while roaming out
in a toy store, we do look at these puzzles and recall old days. And in case
the design is good and challenging, it builds a craving inside us to just give
it another shot. Maybe in future, when we are together again, we’ll have
another round of fun here. J
Contributors: Aashi, Bhaskar