17. A singing snowman and jigsaw puzzle
A hand-painted mini-puzzle that was much more challenging than I expected; and a Snowman song
A Snowman’s Song, performed by Artisan (1998)
This is a crossover posting – I am posting the same newsletter/blog entry for two entirely different audiences. Most people in each group will be introduced both to a cheery snowman song that they haven’t heard before, and to a cheery and challenging snowman jigsaw puzzle that they didn’t know about.
Background/introduction to this newsletter/blog post
Most of you know me only for one newsletter/blog that documents my hobby. Actually I have two current major hobbies and two newsletter/blogs. In May of this year I began one about my new interest in (obsession with?) wooden jigsaw puzzles that had begun in January. But I have had a much more longstanding interest in sharing my findings as a historian/folklorist/collector of Christmas and Midwinter music.
For that hobby, the seasonal newsletter/blog that I started last winter was a transition to a new technology from having compiled seasonal music samplers since 1995. Those began as annual cassette mix-tapes. In 2001 they transitioned to CDs with liner notes that were the product of research into both the history of the songs and their performers, and the social and cultural context from which the music came. The transition to an online format of daily postings leading up to the holidays opened up new possibilities that I was eager to explore, but it also came with a stressful learning curve adapting to new media.
Last year I blew a gasket, as it were, by becoming too ambitious in trying to complement my customary selection of overlooked but very good music with expanded research and analysis. Not a small task, and I got burnt-out in trying to achieve it! I ended up posting what I thought was a very good musical lead-up to the Winter Solstice, but I still have a few semi-written essays that are still in my mind but which will complete the story. But I can’t quite bring them into focus and buckle down to getting them documented. That will come.)
So around Christmas last year I needed some stress relief and that is how wooden jigsaw puzzles came into my life. I didn’t know at the time about the scientific research that proves it, but I intuitively discovered that assembling puzzles is a great stress reliever as well as a lot of fun. I also discovered that assembling puzzles only uses part of my brain. While assembling them my curiosity got sparked by their images or questions about the history of jigsaw puzzles themselves. I began doing the kind of research that I had long been doing to learn more about our musical heritage of seasonal music.
In May I decided to use this medium of Substack postings to document my experiences with jigsaw puzzles and the knowledge I gained. I had learned from my music Samplers that it is more satisfying to share new discoveries with others than just to keep them to myself. I figured that it was because I was still new at jigsaw puzzling that sharing my impressions, insights, and the facts I learned might be a useful record both for me and for others. But it too has been a learning experience and has mushroomed into being more time-consuming than I intended.
I go into far more detail than others in documenting what I am learning online. But I like to think that someday, as my posts become findable with search engines, someone will get an answer or a lead to a question that they are researching, just I as I have found other people’s online postings to be useful.
I am currently working on a large two-part review of the inaugural offerings from a new jigsaw puzzle-maker that has involved assembly of four puzzles in order to get a sufficient understanding to post my conclusions. I have been working on that project for about four weeks now – not that the puzzles themselves have taken much time, but the write-up has been challenging. Writing reviews also forces me to use the judgmental part of my brain – a part that I usually try not to give too much exercise.
That caused me to wonder if I had sufficient reserves to undertake to post a daily seasonal music sampler this year at all. I knew that I already had plenty of very good music in the candidate files in my computer and in my huge collection. My solution has been to scale back my ambitions regarding how much research I will do and how much time I will spend in preparing essays related to the songs, and that has gone well.
Yesterday morning I woke up at about 5AM with an idea. I could pause my big puzzle review project and prepare this combined newsletter/blog posting about a small puzzle I just received that would be quick to assemble. And in the not very large area of the Venn diagram where the jigsaw puzzle circle overlaps with the seasonal music circle I found a snowman. I had just the puzzle, still unopened, for such a project! I turned on the lights, went to the living-room and began what you are about to read.
Folks from both of my mailing lists will probably be relieved to hear that this posting will not include an essay about the history of snowmen and other snow sculptures, or findings from research into the physics that goes into their construction.
This will be the only time that I make the same post to both groups. My other newsletter/blog is Bill’s Midwinter Music, During the run-up to the holidays I send songs-of-the-day and information about them out by email daily. The music is not the usual “Christmas Classics.” I like to think of my songs as vaccination against the holiday music that you will probably hear too much of at this time of year.
If you would like to listen to more of the seasonal songs-of-the-day that I have selected, and possibly subscribe to receive them in your in-box, go to Bill’s Midwinter Music. As with this newsletter/blog, they are free and you don’t need to subscribe to look through the archive. Just click on “I want to try it first.”
The song, and who wrote and sings it
I have selected Artisan’s version of The Snowman’s Song, but it was written by Hilary James and Simon Mayor who are highly regarded British musicians and performers. Click here to hear their version of it from YouTube. (As you will hear, it is clearly part of their children’s music repertoire.)
To show that their musicianship isn’t just for kids I recommend that you click here to hear Mayor & James’ rendition of the medieval round Sumer Is Icumen In. In that video you will also get to see Hilary’s beautiful sketches. If that gets you wanting more, here is their website. They have buttons that will play a wide range of their music, and I recommend that you also click on the button on their banner that says humour.
The vocal harmony group Artisan was comprised of: their arranger and tenor Brian Bedford; the gentle soprano harmony singing and business savvy of his wife Jacey; and the alto powerhouse that is Hilary Spencer. They performed together full time for twenty years from 1985-2005, and occasionally have done reunion concerts since then. I have every one of their Christmas Music CDs. Their version of The Snowman’s Song is on their album Paper Angels, released in 1998. I think that was the same year that I saw Artisan’s famous Stuff the Turkey show which they brought to Victoria on a pre-Christmas Canadian road-trip. That show is still one of my favourite Christmas musical memories.
If you want to hear more of them, or perhaps want some great background music over the Christmas season, you could use this YouTube playlist. Better yet, check out their website for more info about them and to see what downloads and CDs they still have available.
The puzzle and my experiences with it
[Note: Other than as a paying customer I have no association with the maker of this puzzle.]
I first learned about this puzzle from the message shown at the beginning of this newsletter/blog entry. The group is a community, with members that range from newbies to the hobby on up to the owners of major puzzle-making companies. The puzzles discussed range from cheap Chinese knock-offs to the brands that Bill Gates and the Royal Family assemble.
The message caught my attention because I still regretted not having bought Katherine’s Newman’s inaugural Halloween puzzle which had been getting a lot of favourable buzz in the Facebook group before it was sold out. So I bought this one as soon as it was available from her Etsy shop. As I write this, Katherine only has two puzzles left from the 15 that she made so they will probably be sold out by the time I post this review. But I’ll still post anyway, but I won’t follow my usual practice of putting the assembly and images of the finished puzzle below a spoiler alert.
Snowman is a small 60 piece laser-cut mini-puzzle – only 4” x 4” (10 x 10 cm) – made by Katherine Newman. As she said in her message, Katherine is fairly new to laser cutting but her inaugural puzzle, a similarly sized one called 50 Ghosts, made quite a splash in both the British and American online wooden puzzle Facebook groups when she released it in October. I didn’t buy one of those because I thought such a small puzzle wouldn’t be sufficiently challenging. I now know better. This puzzle was great fun and much trickier than I expected.
This puzzle arrived surprisingly quickly after I ordered it. Perhaps that is because it is small enough to be sent like a regular letter rather than a parcel. Inside the outer box it was wrapped in tissue paper like a gift, with a handwritten note from Katherine. This is the first time I have received a puzzle already put together, and without a storage box or bag. I worried about how I would keep from losing pieces.
When I unwrapped the tissue paper I found that Katherine had a tidy solution for that problem. The puzzle is in a frame that fits snugly into an attractive sleeve with a plastic window in the front. Safe storage won’t be a problem.
Since my approach to puzzles is to try to avoid having a fresh image of its artwork in my mind when I begin, I immediately turned the puzzle over and slid it out of its sleeve, letting the pieces tumble down onto my puzzle-board. I set the frame aside and began organizing the pieces. I thought that I was up to the extra challenge of assembling it without the frame since it has so many fewer pieces than I am used to assembling.
Seeing the pieces reminded me that this is a push-fit puzzle – i.e., one where the pieces do not interlock. That type is notoriously more difficult to assemble and I hadn’t had any experience with that style of puzzle yet. But hey, how challenging can 60 pieces be? Besides, I knew from online discussions about push-fits that the main trick to assembling them is to do it on a high-friction surface, not a tabletop. Actually, that works for all jigsaw puzzles, which is one of the reasons why I like to do mine on a cork bulletin board.
Not using the frame was a big mistake! After making very little progress I realized that it had painting was on both sides. (I wonder how she did that? It doesn’t have the usual back-side scorching that you usually find on laser-cut puzzles, even those from some of the biggest and most experienced puzzle-making companies.) Actually, overall that hand painting was a great help because I had actual brushstrokes to help orient the pieces. But having the same colours on the back side definitely added to the difficulty.
Looking back on it, I should have realized that when I had been able to spread out and arrange the pieces on my corkboard so easily without any need for flipping. I had been trying to assemble the puzzle with half of the pieces upside down and not even realizing it! My only excuse for not recognizing it earlier is that it was still before 5:30 AM.
But at least I finally came to my senses. Since I was inexperienced with assembling a push-fit style of puzzle it was pretty silly for me to try to do my first one without using its frame. It was time to start again.
There, that was much better. It was still slow going because my brain was still not fully awake and still had not adjusted to the fact that at any given time half of the pieces were upside down.
In general, one of the skills that puzzlers develop through experience (and that provides the exercise for the brain that scientific research has proven helps with a number of mental health and cognitive decline issues) is to become proficient at subconsciously revolving the loose pieces to match the voids that you are trying to fill. That is why young children can struggle with even simple jigsaw puzzles: Their minds haven’t yet learned how to do that kind of mental adjustments. On the other hand, experienced puzzlers can assemble jigsaws amazingly quickly because the skill has become second nature for them.
I am on my way to developing my own ability to do it, but I had no previous experience with also subconsciously turning the piece over (so that hooks to the left become hooks to the right) and then mentally revolving them as well. It is a skill I will develop with experience, and it may become second nature for me too someday, but for now when the pieces were in the context of being mixed in with other oddly-shaped ones I could not recognize even a very obvious match-up like this one:
Basically, I had to physically turn the pieces over to see the matches. This is where whimsies help by giving very distinctive edges that must go together. It is a well-known phenomenon that the presence of figural pieces helps to make assembly easier.
I finished the distinctive pieces adjacent to the snowflake figural and began flipping at random looking for pieces of snowman (i.e., pieces with white and textured paint):
Maybe if my flipping had been systematic rather than random I would have found all of the black hat pieces more quickly.
Katherine used colour-line cutting around the three big balls that make a snowman’s body. That is sophisticated and sneaky cutting design. (Note: in the world of wood jigsaw puzzles “sneaky” is about as high of a compliment that any puzzler can give to a cutting designer.)
My brain was beginning to be able to both rotate and think upside down. That helped to finish the right-hand side of the puzzle. But I still needed to keep physically flipping pieces to look for the rest of the snowman.
I was finally getting to the stage where there were few enough pieces left that I could recognize the loose ones that I needed even while they were still upside down. I finished the snowman and progress was getting pretty easy.
Although this little puzzle had challenges for me it always stayed fun. I think that the soothing tone of the blue background, the fact that the image exudes such a delicate charm, and the stunning artistry of the figural pieces, prevented any possible frustration from developing even at the beginning when I had been was stuck.
Completing the puzzle felt very satisfying and I think that this little puzzle helped to prepare me for the vintage push-fit puzzles that I have on my to-do shelf. I have been waiting until I felt that my skills were better but this little guy has helped me to feel more confident about taking them on.
Eighteen of the puzzles sixty pieces are either whimsies themselves or parts of multi-piece figurals. That quantity is amazing for such a small puzzle! And they are all truly charming. I really like Katherine’s cut-line reins between Santa and the reindeer in this puzzle.
The little robin, in particular, is exquisite. My natural tendency was to handle him very carefully (although the high quality of this plywood makes him more sturdy than he looks.) In fact, that applies to all of the pieces in this puzzle. They are all so small and lacking in heft that I handle them differently than I do with “regular sized” jigsaw puzzle pieces.
I wouldn’t want a steady diet of this size of puzzle but it makes a nice change of pace. I also don’t think that I would want a puzzle with very many more pieces that were this size, and I no longer feel any temptation to assemble this one without its frame. The lightweight little pieces are too challenging to handle for my shaky fumble-fingers. But, that said, it was so much fun that I assembled it again:
I wasn’t aiming for speed but with the general layout of the puzzle fresh in my mind, and with my developing skills in handling these tiny push-cut pieces, this reassembly took about half an hour (even with the brief breaks for picture-taking.) I didn’t keep track of the net time my initial assembly but my guess would be that it was about three hours.
As for my bottom line, let me put it this way: I am definitely going to buy the similarly-sized rainbow puzzle that Katherine is currently developing and will be releasing soon.
This fun little puzzle was great value at only £25! (It is probably sold out by now but you can check here.)
Thanks for the music and essay in the crossover presentation today of song and puzzle "stuff." I liked the song, and I liked the look of the instruments played by James and Mayor, and I ;iked learning the meaning of a Push-fit puzzle. Cheers to you!