There's 7 Things I Hate About... Jigsaw Puzzles

I spent most of my week off working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was a ‘Cat Lover’s Puzzle’ with different breeds of cats depicted on it. It’s worth remembering that, it’s going to be my point of reference throughout this. It was more challenging than I had thought, particularly because of some hiccups I came across on the first day. I was trying to use a cardboard box as my Puzzle Assembly Surface (that’s its actual name) because it was the only free solid surface I had in my room and it seemed more practical than the floor. However, I soon found it was just slightly too short and too narrow which irritated me more than it probably should have done. I didn’t realise it was possible to rage-quit a jigsaw puzzle, but there we are.

I started a-fresh the following day – yes, on the floor – and while I was plodding along, I found myself compiling a list in my head of the most frustrating things about doing a jigsaw puzzle. I had originally planned to tweet about it but I didn’t think it would make very good thread material. So I thought I’d blog about it instead!

Without further ado, I give you:

The 7 Most Frustrating Things About Doing a Jigsaw Puzzle

1. Turning all the pieces over.

When you first tip the contents of the box onto your Puzzle Assembly Surface (PAS) and the majority of the pieces are face down, so in order to get a clear idea of what you have to work with, you have set about turning them all over. Not only is it fiddly, but as you can imagine with a 1000-piece puzzle, it’s pretty time consuming and rendered mostly redundant once you get started on the assembly itself and you move pieces you don’t need yet to one side and suddenly they’re  face-down again.

2. Starting with the edge pieces

It’s the most logical way to start assembling the puzzle. It gives you an outline, a clear picture of what you’re dealing with and an idea of whether the PAS you’re using is going to be too small and ruin everything (I’m still not over it). So you begin the methodical separation of the edge pieces from all the others and start putting them together and it all seems to be going well.

But just as you think you’ve finished that part and you’ve got yourself a good frame to work with, you spot a gap or two where pieces are missing. Because, of course, it would have been too easy if you’d found all of the edges on your first try. Nope, you somehow missed a few and now they’re somewhere within that pile of pieces you put to one side, thinking you were so clever. Well, rather than suffer through trying to sift through it now, you just have to remember to look out for them as you make your way through the rest of the puzzle. Which you will do – you’ve started, so you’ll finish – just with a hint of bitterness at the disruption to your perfect start.

3. When they don’t fit

You know when you’ve got that one piece that looks like it should fit in that one place, so you confidently go ahead and put it there. Perhaps you were a little too confident though, because it doesn’t actually go there at all. You can see it now, the angle of the tail curl is just slightly off, and the colour of the fur doesn’t quite match. So you go to remove it, but because it doesn’t fit properly, the tab is a little bit stuck. So you have to yank and wiggle in order to separate it without ripping it or pulling apart the successfully connected pieces that surround it, which is a challenge in itself. However, seeing as this will no doubt happen several times, you’ll be an expert at the separation by the end.

Which leads me neatly onto...

4. This.

5. The trick piece

You know that one piece where you can’t seem to match it to anything on the picture they give for reference. Suddenly, it’s like you just can’t see for looking. No matter how much you turn it or squint at it, the tip of that ear does not seem to belong to any of the cats on the image. You even become convinced that it’s a trick, a decoy piece. It doesn’t belong in the puzzle at all, the manufacturers have just put it in the box to mess with you, which is no doubt the kind of thing they would do. You put it aside, thinking you’ve sussed them out. So, of course, you feel like a right wally later on when you’re trying to find a piece that will fit at the top of that one cat’s head and realise that’s where the ‘trick’ one belongs. Well played, Puzzle-Maker. Well played.

6. Almost, but not quite

Sometimes you’ll have a couple of pieces that you know all belong in the same area, to the same cat. You’ve got the face, the tail, one of the paws and you know roughly where they all fit in to the bigger picture. But there’s just that one piece you haven’t found yet that would link them all together. So now you can put them down roughly where they’re supposed to be but with a great big gap in the middle. Of course, that will just make it all the more satisfying when you later find the piece that slots in place perfectly, but that doesn’t take away the initial frustration of an incomplete image.

7. The Missing Piece

You’ve spent hours (spread over a few days) working on this puzzle. It’s actually been quite enjoyable, aside from the rage-quit and the eye strain and the backache and the panic that it was all going to go wrong when your cat decided to wander across the middle of your PAS. And now here you are, with a fully constructed image of 54 different breeds of cats, most of which you’d never heard of before, so it’s even been educational!

But wait… it’s not fully constructed. You spot a gap, right where the body of the Cornish Rex should be. There’s a piece missing.

You search the area surrounding the PAS, but it’s not there. That’s okay, it must still be in the box. You check, but nope, no sign of it.

Well, it’s a brand-new jigsaw, surely it can’t have gone far. You’ll probably find it when you start clearing away, it’ll be in a really obvious place. Then you’ll get annoyed because now most of the puzzle is disassembled, so you won’t be able to say you finished the jigsaw, unless you put it all back together again just to put that one piece in its place. But that would be petty and you’re not that petty, are you? No, of course not.



Instead, you’ll just spend a couple of hours writing up that list – you know, the one you’ve been obsessing over for the last few days – of trivial things that frustrate you about doing jigsaw puzzles and put it out there for people to read. Even though in reality you quite like doing jigsaws and you’re thinking of going through it all again with a Where’s Wally? one.

Because that’s not at all petty, is it?

Song on Repeat: Ignorance - Paramore