working on a puzzle

A month ago I was shopping at one of those remainder stores, TJ Maxx or something like that. There were a few puzzles on sale, I got some kid ones for the grandkids and then went ahead and picked up one of the few adult ones there. I know why this puzzle was there – it is hard!

I hesitated, this one is hard! I went for it, why not, it will be a good challenge. Or I’ll shoot myself.

One thing I’ve learned about these kind of puzzles – it is very easy to put puzzle pieces in the wrong place. I did while making the border and it’s happened in the middle of the puzzle. Btw, took me a long time to complete the border.

I’ve tried to divide puzzle pieces by color. I am also using the mat, which really came in handy when we had guests for dinner. It was about at this stage I rolled it up and and moved it away.

Once I unwrapped it, as you can see, the puzzle is still in place! Woohoo!

One way of finding the right puzzle piece, especially when it’s a solid area is just to find as many piece of that color as possible and then one by one try them out. It also works with the white flowers.

This is where I am after over two weeks of work. You’ll notice that I have a lot of holes, I keep trying to find those missing pieces. When I do, of course it’s not at all what I expected. One thing I’ve come to know about puzzles is that I have to look for what I can’t see. At this point I have individual pieces that I know exactly where they go, but I can’t find their surrounding pieces. I have thought that one piece goes one place and it really is on the opposite side of the puzzle. One good thing is, at this point, if I’m holding a ‘white’ piece, I now have plenty of places to try it out. Lo and behold! It works, I will often slip in a piece where I really wasn’t expecting to. As hard as this is, I do enjoy the challenge.