Please bear with me on this one. I fully understand that a blog about jigsaws is unlikely to get the pulse racing. I hadn’t been close to a jigsaw since I was a child but due to a combination of Covid and early retirement I started doing the occasional five hundred piece one. To my surprise I found that I actually enjoyed it. Not so much the process (more of that shortly) but the feeling of accomplishment when the last piece slots into place.

Before long I had graduated to a thousand pieces. This is where the bulk of adult jigsaw sales lie (around 30% according to Google) with 95% of the total market sitting below 2000 pieces. Of course a large amount of those other sales are for children’s puzzles which often don’t even reach 100 pieces. Even so if I were to rub shoulders with the elite top 5% of dissectologists (yes, there is an actual name for people who do jigsaws) I was going to have to complete a 2000 piece one.

For Fathers Day I received such a puzzle and there was then no excuse not to a least try and attempt it. I wouldn’t class myself as being good at jigsaws, in the sense of being able to do them quickly, but I am persistent. As mentioned earlier the process brings with it a number of first world annoyances. For example, at least ten times it seems that a piece is missing. Can you say you’ve done a 2000 piece jigsaw when it only contains 1999 pieces I wonder? Additionally what seems like whole hours go by without a single piece being fitted. Finally it appears every jigsaw ever made comes with either a whole lot of sky in the scene or failing that a whole lot of forest. With every piece looking the same.

Anyway many many MANY hours later as you can see above I did get there. Further research shows there is a tiny fraction of the market at around 1% of 3000, 5000 and even 10,000 piece jigsaws! All things considered though I think I will bow out gracefully at this point.