Enjoying Putting Together a Good Jigsaw Puzzle

This weekend I began "work" on a new 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle my son Will gave me for Christmas.  It is a picture of several beautiful specimens of shells, starfish, and other "bottom feeders", full of different colors and assorted shapes.  I'm accustomed to do the 300-500 piece puzzles, largely because I simply don't have the large flat surface available to do the larger varieties.  With this one, I've broken down the process to two medium surfaces and some boxes into which I presort the pieces by color.  It looks now like I'm about two thirds of the way to completion, but there are still a lot more pieces to fit together. 

Putting together jigsaw puzzles is a fun activity I've enjoyed doing ever since I can remember...back when I was a little kid we would do some monster-size puzzles by spreading out the pieces on the floor (out of the way of foot traffic, of course) and it would be there for days, if not weeks, at a time...with anyone passing by welcome to work on it.  Naturally, being much closer to the ground at the time than anyone else, I had a decided advantage over everyone in my family except my sister Anita, who is four years my senior.  I especially remember one such puzzle that featured a battle in space between death-ray-firing combatants: except for the bottom left corner, which looked like the moon, almost the entire puzzle was midnight blue with little points of white as stars...nearly impossible to do!

Almost eight years ago, back in March 2008, I wrote another blog article about jigsaw puzzles...here is a link to it [link]...