The last few weeks had been quite a season of change for Bruce Ree. After a 20 year hiatus from jigsaw puzzling, he did a 1000 piece puzzle live on a twitch stream from first to last piece taking 10 hours to complete. It was a cheap $5 box I picked up at Winners, just to see if I still liked jigsaw puzzles. During this past year, I’ve been going through a list of things that I’d like to do / try and a 1000 piece puzzle was on it since I recall having fond memories of peace and calm while doing them as an angry teenager.

It was so enjoyable and such a high that I decided to do another 1000 piece puzzle stream with the intention of trying a new technique of leaving pieces in the box rather than spreading it all over the table. I came into possession of this particular red barn jigsaw puzzle by virtue of defeating another puzzler in an arcade game. It was a prize put up by yet another puzzler who had an excess inventory of previously completed puzzles. Little did I know, this was a particularly difficult puzzle compared to the one I did a few weeks prior. I was expecting to be well under 10 hours thanks to a new technique that I was trying out. What makes this far more complicated to solve was the large amount of foliage that covers the image and the soft focus as well. A large amount of pieces just looked like camouflage with bright and dark shades of red and yellow. I had to resort to a brute force tactic (literally trying every piece left) at times to get moving again. It was during this puzzle stream that I met GMA a twitch streamer @ijustlovepuzzles and her incredible fam / community. They cheered me on as I was fading during this 33 hour live stream. This was literally the stream that made me twitch affiliate, I’ll always remember this incredible moment. Thanks GMA and fam!!

w@dllm.ca