Puzzle: a group project

One of our lecturers brought in a puzzle the other week for us to work on in our breaks if we wanted. It's a truly beautiful puzzle of a wildlife sanctuary, with tigers and elephants and peacocks. And 500 pieces.

And so it began. The collection of border pieces - some of which turned out not to be border pieces! We discovered this when we finished the border and had three ´border pieces´ left over...

With the border complete, we began to organise pieces into 'elephant', 'tiger', 'bird', and 'flower' categories. The elephants, birds and small flowers (as opposed to the enormous flowering tree) were easier, and were completed progressively over a few days.

There are four tigers in the picture. They were by far the hardest section, so we left them till last.  Which also meant we ended up working more or less from left to right - except that most of the time one or more of us were working upside down!

Which meant that by the time we worked on the tigers, we had fewer pieces to worry about and search through. It was both more frustrating and quicker to finish at this stage!

We finished it Wednesday evening before we had a bit of a farewell party in the classroom for a family who left on Thursday. Turns out a completed puzzle is much easier to defend against the interference of curious not-quite-three year olds than individual pieces!

All in all, we had about 7 adults and one or two children involved in this group project. Some of us were more obsessed with it than others!

Did you notice that it is a glow-in-the-dark puzzle? I´d post a photo, but my camera in simgularly inept at capturing the beauty of soft light in a dark setting.

How do you go about doing a puzzle? My youngest sister resists the 'border first' strategy for small children's puzzles (she is only 9 years old). Are you a shape based puzzle piece searcher, or a colour or picture based searcher? I found myself looking for shapes in ambiguous settings!