For your stray attention this weekend

On jigsaws, stitches and the dresses I thought I made

Scroll to the bottom for: US (Chautauqua) speaking dates • August and September’s Book Club dates & links

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This week, I’ve spent quite a lot of my time doing a jigsaw.

It’s a calling I get once a year - the urge to spend hours and hours riffling my fingers through the rattling pieces, circling and circling as the image slowly grows. It’s an exercise in negative space, a dialogue with absence. Patches of colour form, bloom, spread across the table until they join. 

I am very specific about the kind of jigsaws I’ll tackle. I have to actually like the picture, and it must be detailed. I hate puzzles with huge areas of the same colour, meaning I spend hours and hours on the same, monotonous patch. I love ones with funny little things to find in them. The current one, for example, is a cartoon representation of New York city (with the Statue of Liberty very much in the wrong place, i.e. inland), but when you look closely, everything has a face. Well, not everything, but many things, like water towers and clouds. There are also sentient fruits and ice creams wandering around. It keeps offering me tiny delights that reward my attention. 

My current jigsaw. Note the geographically rogue Statue of Liberty