In the 15 years we've been together Brian and I had never done a jigsaw puzzle together before. That is until this past Christmas. About 5 or 6 years ago I bought us a puzzle....I think it was 6 years ago, when BJ was about 6 months old. I thought we'd have time to do it and it would be fun. Well it got stuck up on a shelf and forgotten about until I moved it to a box. And there it sat for a few more years.
Since Brian's work has a winter shutdown every year I thought this year would be the year we put the puzzle together....so we started. It is a 1000 piece Thomas Kinkade Christmas Celebration....
As you can see it has a LOT of white/soft colors. But I like a challenge. We started out on a fold out card table so as not to clutter up our dining room table. We sorted the pieces and put the frame of it together.
It took us about 2.5 hours to get this done. Then we took a break for the night. The next day we decided to spread the pieces out on our dining room table and leave the puzzle on the card table. This is what our table looked like....
Over the next few days we were able to make pretty good progress on the puzzle but unfortunately since we didn't start it until December 26th, and had family in town the next week we didn't get it finished before Brian had to go back to work. So we had a partially put together puzzle sitting in the corner of our living room for a few weeks.
Over the past 2 weeks Brian has started putting it together again. For some reason after working on it for over 12 hours I couldn't get back into it.
The last two nights he really made great progress. As he was ALMOST finished I decided I should help a little more. So last night we got it done.
Let me be very clear. Out of about 25-30 hours that this puzzle took to put together I helped for maybe 12-13 hours of it. It was fun and I hope to get another one for us to work on soon. Maybe one that has a spring or summer scene -- or a national landmark --- I don't know I'll have to ask Brian what he thinks.
But I have to add one more thing about this puzzle....we didn't think about counting the pieces until we had at least the frame done, so we didn't. I'm glad we didn't because I would hate to think that we would have been discouraged if we had found out we were missing one. Yes that's right we ARE MISSING ONE PIECE. I don't think it got lost because the puzzle really hasn't been moved around much. But here's the corner with the missing piece.
The cool thing about us liking puzzles is our kids like them too. We've always had the "kid" friendly puzzles. Like the wooden ones that the pieces aren't together but just in a frame. But this year for Christmas both Santa and Brian and I got all the kids some puzzles. And they love working on them.
The top two are for Lili, then the bottom left 2 are Hank's and BJ has the bottom right 2. I wish I had pictures of them putting them together but I don't because I normally am working on the puzzles with them.
This is definitely a fun family activity I would recommend to anyone. And it can be a relative cheap form of entertainment for the adults of the family when they don't want to just sit in front of the tv and veg!
And now I can say Brian and I HAVE done a jigsaw puzzle together.
Are you going to glue it and then frame it? It's very pretty. We have a Tigger puzzle that we got as a gift quite a few years ago that I would love to do...if nothing else just do it doesn't sit on our shelf any longer! Maybe I'll try to get Ben to work on it a day or two a week on our dining room table since we don't use it regularly.
ReplyDeletewe're thinking about it....I've given us til this weekend to figure it out because by then I am going to want the table out of my living room.
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