Puzzles

Photo credit: Private

I don't remeber exactly when but I received a present from my boyfriend. It was a box of 3000 puzzles. But they were really special because it was picture of Canale Grande in Venice, Italy, where we spent great holiday together and had fantastic time. Not forgetting the fact that we like doing puzzles. I found this text on the box and I want to share it with you:

"Doing a puzzle is a bit like doing yoga exercises...a very welcome relaxation from your daily routine. It is a labour of love, challenge and light relief all in one. Doing puzzles is exciting, with invigorating emotional ups and downs. Piece for piece, as you search, find and search again, your feeling of achievement grows. One person can work on a puzzle--or a whole group." It's really nice, don't you think?

Before we opened the box, we checked the size because we weren't sure if our dining table was enough to make them. Table was big enough when we considered the whole size but was to small to work on them comfortably. So we went to the shop to buy big piece of plywood to put it on the table and get more space in the same way. The color of it was grey so when you had a lot of dark puzzles you couldn't find needed piece, eyes were getting tired easily so to make it easier we put white paper on that. Then we went through 3000 pieces grouping them according to their shape (to make a frame) and colors: there was a pile of blue pieces for sky, the second one for water, another for buildings, etc. Preparations had taken quite a lot of time before we started but it was so much easier after all.

At the beginning, I was excited and couldn't wait to start and see the result. After hours of preparations and first matches I was little overwhelmed. After few more days of not seeing the progress I expected, I was discouraged and started thinking about putting everything in the box again and just forget about it. But slowly and steady, piece by piece, we were seeing more and more progress. Motivation and excitement came back again. Every day there were less puzzles to make, we knew we were almost done. And one day we were. Really happy and satisfied with what we saw. Beautiful picture with all the details of the place where we were together.

I was making pictures while doing puzzles. I thought that it could be great to see the work in progress. I think it was something around three years ago and I found these photos lately. At that time when we were making puzzles I didn't think much about finances. Ok, I was thinking about getting job, plans, dreams and so on but finances weren't such a big problem then. Now they are. And when I looked at these pictures I thought that doing puzzles is like taking control of your personal life and finances. Financial problems are like this box of puzzles. You know they are there, you even know how they look like because you have a picture of them. Then you make a decision to start working on them, to change something for better, you are excited and you open that box and confront with the problem. You prepare everything to start, to take control. You divide them into different groups: consumer debt, mortgage, retirement, holidays, just name it. And slowly but steady you work on them, with your ups and downs. Sometimes you don't have time to sit down and do puzzles, you don't have money to pay of your debt but with baby-steps you're closer to your goal, to see the whole picture. Sometimes you're impatient, frustrated, make mistakes and you're just tired but sometimes you're happy, satisfied and excited. Because you have things under control.

When I was making pictures of puzzles, I didn't think that one day I was going to write about it and put them on my blog. Wow, I even didn't think I was going to start a blog! So the quality it's not the best one  so I'm sorry for that. But if you would like to see the whole proces, feel free to visit "Puzzle" album on Facebook. There have been already some photos from Venice-puzzles but in the future I'll post some more from another sets. It's not only because I like doing puzzles but I would like to encourage you to this frugal hobby and show that it's not only for kids.

So, do you remember the last time when you did puzzles? :)