How Puzzling!

We had a busy busy weekend, including kayaking the Chicago River.  Looking to take it easy on Sunday night, we browsed our game shelf in the closet and decided to do a puzzle - we are indeed an 80-year old couple. 

And so, after 3 nights of working on the puzzle we neared the finish line.

BUT!

We got skunked when we got down to the last piece and found ourselves with two spaces left!  A quick search around the table and even the plastic bag it came in. - yes, Bob went through the garbage to try to complete this puzzle - turned up empty.  Much like the Sphinx with its missing nose, our puzzle too was "less than."

As we worked on that 1000 piecer, I thought about how you could decorate with a completed puzzle. . .

The easiest way to decorate with one is to frame it and slap it on the wall.  Bob actually has a glued together puzzle of Rome that we are going to be putting on the wall in our guest bedroom (a small hint on the theme, stay tuned in the next couple weeks for that completed room!).

Taking it a step further, you could take a cue from this Mozaikit art idea and make your puzzle a little more "reckless."  Undo your hard work by taking apart a corner of the puzzle (keeping the pieces in as much order as you can) and spread them out from the puzzle.  Glue the whole thing on a canvas or a mat within a frame.

Puzzles are made more difficult when there is a large background area that is all the same or similar colors.  Take advantage of this open space and create a multi-hole picture frame.  Complete the puzzle - that's the hard part - and then break out picture size squares or other shapes.  Glue or tape in a series of pictures that can go along with the puzzle's theme.  Unfortunately, my travels have yet to take me to Egypt, so I am not able to fully realize the potential of this puzzle.  Some random shots from Hawaii make sense, right? 

So there are a couple ideas for keeping your puzzle alive. Possibly more appealing than immediately breaking it apart and putting it all back in the box to be pulled out on another lazy Sunday.  

 I loved doing puzzles when I was younger and got nostalgic for my favorite type.  I had 2 or 3 of the "Talking Jigsaw Puzzles."  The premise of these was that every piece fit together and the theme would be locations like an Apartment Building or a School. Fitting together each set of four pieces that made up a window was the easy part - you then had to use clues from the conversation bubbles to figure out placement of each square.  Once you were done, flipping it over would reveal the word "Congratulations" written out over and over again so you could make sure you had done it right  Doesn't look like they make these any longer, but I did find one on Amazon for. . .$82??  Crikey!  Maybe I should have kept mine for some potential eBay action. . .