Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.
Gifting jigsaw puzzles can be tricky. They vary in difficulty. Not everyone is into spending hours fiddling with a game like that. And then the vast variety of images depicted in their giant tabletop chaos can evoke a feeling that is often a matter of taste, particularly for larger sets that sit there taunting you to build them for weeks and weeks.
Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and hit the nail directly, squarely on the head.
See, back in November we spent five days in New York City. Specifically, we spent five days wandering around mostly near midtown Manhattan and Times Square. We did a lot of fun stuff, but my own personal recollections of the time there were punctuated by three specific memories: Broadway, sketching, and people everywhere.
Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and it depicts a bustling scene of Time Square rendered as a colourful urban sketch of a hundred memories of our recent New York vacation.
Tall colourful buildings.
Taxicabs and street vendors.
People and signs and shapes and shadows.
Lines and hatches and curves and squiggles.
A thousand pieces of a travel memory perfectly encapsulated in a jigsaw puzzle project.
…though it didn’t take us too long at all to get it assembled.