Lifelong puzzle fan Shirley Jacob took on a huge challenge, but in the end she solved the biggest puzzle of her life: a puzzle with 18,240 small pieces.

She worked on it for a total of about six months, spread out over the course of a year, and the end result is huge as puzzles go, measuring nine feet by seven feet, or in metric, 276 by 192 centimetres.

article continues below

“I have done puzzles all my life. As my children and eventually the grandchildren got older, they started challenging me to see who could find the most difficult,” said Shirley, noting that one year they bought her five puzzles.

“My daughter would go to a store that sold puzzles and ask for the hardest one they had in the store for her mother.”

Prior to this monster puzzle, a granddaughter gave her one that claimed to be “the world’s most difficult puzzle”, a 15-inch square 500-piece jigsaw puzzle that was double-sided, with the same picture on back and front.

The challenge for this one was, one side was turned 90 degrees, and each piece was identically cut from both sides, so even an expert puzzler would have a hard time telling one side from the other.

The picture was of cupcakes with icing and sprinkles, and Shirley solved it by building it on her table above a mirror, and she completed it in 12 days.

In February of last year, her grandchildren came for supper, and her grandson-in-law came while his wife and children were at a hockey game and dance. He came in with a large box wrapped in Christmas paper and set it on the dining room table, and when the others came home, he said, “Let’s watch Grandma open her Christmas present.”

“I started to unwrap the gift, making the comment, ‘well, at least it’s not a jigsaw puzzle’. You can imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a puzzle. My grandson-in-law said it was worth the cost to see the look on my face,” chuckled Shirley.

She assembled the puzzle in quarters on sheets of plywood on her dining room table, and did the first half of it between Feb. 25 and June 11. She left it alone for the summer, and began the second half on Sept. 24, not finishing it until Feb. 22.

With the help of her son, she put the four plywood sheets on her living room floor, and it took about three days of carefully fitting it together to get the entire puzzle put together.

Looking at it spread out on her floor, she said, “It feels good to be done.”

She won’t take the puzzle apart for a while yet, as her friends and family have said they would like to see it. If anyone wants to come out to her house to see it, they are welcome to drop by. Phone her first at 306-842-5697 to make sure she is available.

With spring on the horizon, the avid gardner said she won’t do another puzzle for a while yet, as she will be turning her attention to her gardening soon.