Puzzled

I solve my jigsaw puzzles in my dining room, on a little platform that rests atop four thin drawers designed for sorting and storing. I start by pouring the puzzle pieces onto the platform, turning them face up, and arranging them into categories helpful to the eventual solving. One drawer is reserved for straight-edged pieces, and the other three get pieces of similar themes or colors, pieces that seem as though they will eventually make up some distinguishing feature of the larger image—a mountain ridge or teacup, perhaps.

It’s a good system. And yet, as I stared at my latest puzzle—a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s leafy, lovely Tree of Life tapestry—no obvious categories presented themselves, save for the border pieces. Even those were dismayingly similar in color and pattern, making it nearly impossible to build from the one corner piece I located. The best I could do was to divide the pile roughly between pieces with bluish backgrounds and those with a gold-beige hue, leaving one drawer disconcertingly empty. I felt defeated before even beginning.

To grasp the extent of my dilemma, it is helpful to have in view the intricacies of a William Morris design. Morris, father of England’s Arts and Crafts movement, is perhaps best remembered for his audacious declaration that you should “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—a dictate evidenced by his intricate and sumptuous floral wallpapers. Morris patterns are dense and winding—full of fruit, vines, birds, and leaves—and simultaneously repetitive and symmetrical, in the style of an oriental rug. Though Morris’s symmetry is an aesthetic choice, the repetition is largely a function of process. Many of his wallpapers were created through woodblock printing, with artisans painstakingly aligning the woodblock motifs over and over in what’s called a seamless repeat.

I would not have lasted long in a Morris studio. After finally assembling my puzzle’s outer border through a slow process of elimination, I was conflicted about whether to continue. Or rather, I was unsure how to. Each puzzle piece was a mystery unto itself. It was impossible to tell top from bottom or whether the piece was to be situated horizontally or vertically into the whole. The best approach seemed to be the trial-and-error one I had taken with the border pieces. But that was a finite set—not even 100 of the 1,000-piece total. The thought of trial and error with the remaining 900 was dispiriting. I am not built for seamless repeat.