ELMS Puzzles

A few weeks ago, I was reading Architectural Digest in the waiting room of the Sports Medicine clinic and I saw an article about George W. and Laura Bush's home on their ranch in Crawford, Texas. When the author described a table that "usually had an ELMS puzzle" on it, I dropped the magazine and googled ELMS.

ELMS is based in Maine where they hand make wooden jigsaw puzzles. I was smitten. Instead of selling the puzzles, they rent them out for three months. I called up to find out more about it. I talked to one of the women who cuts the puzzles and we talked in the phone for forty-five minutes about their puzzles. I joined and ordered some puzzles for my recovery period. The puzzles come in a green cardboard box with no picture of what the puzzles is supposed to be.

"You are entering advanced puzzling territory," said Jack. "This is serious stuff."

Tower of London

I fell in love with wooden jigsaw puzzles a few years ago when I came across Liberty Puzzles at Card Kingdom in Ballard. Liberty is based out of Boulder, Colorado, and there puzzles are laser cut by a machine.

The joy of all wooden puzzles are the crazy shapes.  Instead of all of the shapes being close to similar like in a cardboard puzzle, each piece in a wooden puzzle is fairly unique. There are dancers and animals and objects that relate to the theme of the puzzle. I often will start one of these puzzles by looking for matching shapes instead of matching colors or themes.

Why do I love these puzzles so much? I am almost addicted. I get in a zen-like flow state, where my subconscious brain will pick a piece before my conscious mind knows what is happening. Jack commented that I am really good at this. I am. I hoping that when I fully recover from my knee injury, I can get a job in the lucrative jigsaw puzzle assemblers market.

Ha. I am not sure what transferable skills match up with solving jigsaw puzzles. Maybe I could become a maker of puzzles myself, or starting my own jigsaw puzzle company.

Today is the third day after my surgery, and my friend Lisa stopped over for lunch. She is a social worker who focuses on abused and neglected children. She reads about mindfulness, and she saw my stash of stuff to keep me busy during the acute phase of recovering from the surgery. I have coloring books, puzzles, quilting projects, Soduko puzzles, books, and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice.

Finding things to keep me busy during my post-surgery days is hard. My leg was too stiff to move comfortably this morning, so I took some oxycodone. After the oxycodone, I was too woozy and dizzy to move. This seems pretty much like lose-lose to me.

But I have my puzzles and quilts to keep me occupied.