Patience And PersistencePay Off For Puzzlers

 

By Nancy K. Crevier

Two big puzzles in Newtown have been solved — jigsaw puzzles, that is. Patti Roberts placed the 700th and final piece into the “Royal Wings” jigsaw in the C.H. Booth Library on Tuesday afternoon, September 9, after six weeks of working on it. The puzzle is one of several the library has set out on the main floor for patrons to work at throughout the summer, and Ms Roberts put her two cents worth into each of the previous ones, as well. But the most recent puzzle, a highly patterned butterfly, was daunting to most folks who passed through, said librarian Beryl Harrison. “I think other patrons put in pieces here and there, but Patti did almost all of it,” said Ms Harrison.

The C.H. Booth Library is Ms Roberts’ drop-off point each day, allowing her to exercise as she walks from there to her job as a server at the Blue Colony Diner on Church Hill Road.

“Working on the puzzles is a lot of fun,” said Ms Roberts, who moved to Newtown in March. “It’s a good way to relax before going to work. It’s sort of my ‘calm before the storm’ that gets me ready,” she said.

Ms Roberts said that she has worked jigsaw puzzles her whole life, many up to 1,500 pieces, but that the “Royal Wings” was by far the toughest puzzle she had encountered. “It looks easy, but it was very difficult. There are no even edges and the pieces are odd-sized. Normally, I start with the edges, but not in this case.”

Each time Ms Roberts stopped into the library, she hoped that someone else would have made progress on the butterfly puzzle, but other than a few pieces, that rarely occurred.

“On Tuesday, I knew I had just 107 pieces left to put in. So I came by at 1:30 pm and I was determined to finish it,” said Ms Roberts. Two hours later, she slipped the last piece into place.

“It’s a real feeling of accomplishment,” she said.

The puzzle is temporarily preserved beneath glass and can be seen on the Main Floor of the library.

 

An 18,000-Piece Challenge

Not all that far from the C.H. Booth Library, the St Rose Parish Center is housing Father John Inserra’s monument to patience in a second floor room. There, the 5-foot by 10-foot, 18,000 piece “St Columba Altarpiece” is stretched across four tables that fill the room wall to wall. The massive puzzle is a copy of the painting done by the 14th Century Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden for the St Columba Church in Cologne, Germany, and which now hangs in the Alte Pinakothek Museum in Munich, Germany. The puzzle is the size of the actual painting, said Father Inserra.

The St Rose priest started the puzzle while on vacation at his parents’ home in Rhode Island the summer of 2006. “With a big family — there were 11 kids — we did puzzles a lot growing up,” said Father Inserra. This particular puzzle came in three bags of 6,000 pieces each, and was easily one of the biggest puzzles he had ever undertaken to put together, he said.

He started out assembling the puzzle on the ping-pong table in his parents’ basement, but realized 2,500 pieces into it that he needed more space. So he carefully lifted the completed sections into three plastic and Styrofoam-lined puzzle carriers, and move them and the remaining bags of pieces to Newtown, where he commandeered an underutilized room in the Parish Center and settled in to work whenever he had spare time.

He has developed a technique for building large puzzles over the years that served him particularly well in this case. “The first thing I do is separate all of the pieces by color. Then I separate those colored pieces by shape, putting everything onto a large piece of cardboard to keep them straight. Once you get going, you know what possible piece can go in a spot and which cannot,” said Father Inserra.

When work on the puzzle was going smoothly, it was possible to get lost in the process, he said. “It’s fun, it’s relaxing, and it’s meditative. People talk about patience, but I think it’s about being satisfied with what you do,” said Father Inserra.

There is a lot to be learned from puzzles, and Father Inserra uses the metaphor of the puzzle frequently in his homilies at church. “St Columba Altarpiece” is missing one piece, for instance, but that doesn’t bother him. “I think the puzzle has a lot of meaning without that puzzle piece,” he said. That does not mean he has not searched for the piece, however, looking in his parents’ home, his car, and scouring every square inch of the room. But for now, the puzzle remains just 17, 999 pieces, and that, he said, is fine.

Father Inserra estimates that he spent more than 900 hours altogether, completing the puzzle in April of this year. Many parishioners have viewed the large puzzle, but he is eager to show it to other residents in the town. Eventually, the puzzle will have to be dismantled to make way for his next puzzle project — there are two more 18,000-piece puzzles in storage biding their time — but in anticipation of that day, Father Inserra has painstakingly joined the pieces of “St Columba Altarpiece” together in 12 sections with a backing of masking tape.

He hopes one day to find a place to permanently display the giant puzzle, and said that he welcomes any suggestions as to where that might be. “It’s a beautiful puzzle and it’s been a lot of fun,” he added.

To view the puzzle, contact Father Inserra at 426-1014.