Listen to the Zoom conversation, or read the transcript below.

October 9, 2022

Nancy: I have here with me today, Roz Smith Rea, and by way of introduction, Roz and I have known each other for 60 years. We went to grade school together and high school in Concord, MA, and then she joined us as a junior at Williams. I have to say that I consider her sort of responsible for my interest in Williams because I didn't know anything about Williams until I went to a football game with Roz and her parents in the late 60s. Her brother, Sandy, was on the football team. I was so smitten by Williams--it was a gorgeous fall day in the Berkshires so how could I not have fallen in love with it? When I found out a few years later that they were accepting women I jumped right in. I owe a lot of that to Roz. The cool thing is that we have been in touch over all these years: we're part of a group of six high school classmates who periodically get together. So I'm able to keep in touch even though Roz lives in Maine now and I'm in Montana.

A number of years ago I was intrigued when she talked about retiring and getting into making wooden puzzles. The first never really happened; I guess she sort of retired but her place of work, which she'll tell you about, kept reeling her back because she was so instrumental. But she did take up puzzle making, so for the last 10 years I have been the grateful recipient every Christmas of these beautiful handmade puzzles. She makes the same one for each of us in the high school group. She is just amazing: each one becomes more diabolical and cleverer and makes me swear at her under my breath! I sit down with a glass of wine on a quiet evening and just know that it's going to take me more than an hour to do what might be a 65- to 90-piece puzzle. I have a great regard for her skills even though she will say that if she did it more she'd be better—well, that's true of everything. I was so fascinated by this world of puzzle making that she's introduced me to that I thought it'd be really fun to have her share it with us. 

Roz, do you want to give us a quick snapshot of your world?

Roz: After graduating from Williams, I got very interested in historic house museums and people who worked in such places. I went to North Carolina and worked for the Museum of Southern Decorative Arts. Eventually I took some time off when I got married and had a couple of boys. In 1986 my husband and family settled on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Most people know that's the home of Acadia National Park. I didn’t work while the kids were small and then I began to long to get back into American decorative arts, so I got a job at a historic house in Ellsworth, ME, which is just about 20 miles from Bar Harbor. I became the collections manager there. They had never cataloged their collection so that was my first task. 

After about 10 years of doing that, I was getting a little restless. I wanted to enjoy living near Acadia National Park and hiking and taking advantage of it. I've always had in the back of my mind this curiosity about wooden puzzles. Back in the 1990s, I had noticed an article in Down East magazine about a company in western Maine called Elms Puzzles. It was a nice little two- or three-page article about these people who cut wooden jigsaw puzzles. I thought “wow that's kind of neat,” and I remembered back to my childhood—many people can tell the same story—that they would go to their grandparent’s summer house and there would be some nice old wooden puzzles and they’d do them together. They have these warm fuzzy feelings about summertime vacation with grandparents and family putting together wooden puzzles. So I thought that might be something that would be interesting to me. As I said, after about 10 years of working at this museum, and with my kids gone, I thought maybe now is the time to investigate puzzle cutting. I’d mention it to people and they'd look at me sort of quizzically, like “really?” Eventually, while on a trip with the group of women Nancy spoke of, I mentioned it and one of them said, “My husband used to do that… he doesn't do it anymore, maybe he would sell you his saw.” It took a little bit of time but eventually I did buy this absolutely wonderful saw from her husband and got a couple of books about how to cut puzzles. There was nobody living near me who cut wooden puzzles, so I never saw anyone demonstrate it. 

Of course, nowadays you can get online and go to YouTube and there are lots of demonstrations about how to do it. Basically, it was just sort of getting to know the materials that you need and experimenting. I must say I was very naïve: I thought, “Oh I have all these great ideas about interesting puzzles, and I’ll call my business ‘Out of the Box Puzzles.’” Things like irregular edges and trick corners—and, of course, I soon found out all of that had already been done. But in my exploration about how to get started with cutting puzzles and looking for information online, I came across this organization called the Puzzle Parley—we’ll get into that probably a little bit later. That really broadened my horizons about what wooden jigsaw puzzles are. So I started cutting in 2011, although my first attempts were very crude as I tried to cut standard shapes like you see in cardboard puzzles. 

Nancy: Could you talk a bit about some of the things that are unlike the puzzles we’d make at our grandparent’s house? What has changed about puzzles since then?

Roz: Most of the puzzles that you would have done were cut probably back in the 30s, which was a boom time for puzzle cutting. Lots of people took it up: It was a way to make a little bit of money during the Depression when people didn’t have the money to go out and travel or go to the theater or whatever. They had a lot of rental puzzle clubs. So putting together puzzles really took off in the 30s. Most of those puzzles were one of two types. The standard was interlocking puzzles: You’ve got a shape here and another shape and they interlock and hold together when you pick it up. 

What I absolutely love is push-fit puzzles, which are puzzles that don't interlock. They're very pesky to do because nothing holds them together. Say you're putting these pieces together on a table and somebody comes along and bumps the table and they kind of jump apart. It's very annoying.

Nancy: That’s what I meant about ‘diabolical’ when you first sent me a push-fit puzzle. 

Roz: Here's an example of the push-fit style of puzzle where they can be cut in any kind of shape, wavy or straight lines or whatever, but they're just going to push together and fit together. I really loved that kind of puzzle. For a long time, that was pretty much what people did, and then folks started putting special shapes in. Some of the cutters back in the 30s and 40s had some fabulous shapes—they’re called whimsies or figurals. 

Here's a maple leaf figural that I like to cut. I wouldn't cut other maple leaves in that puzzle; it would have just one. I might also put in a flying bird. There are a lot of people who do humans running or fishing. Sometimes you can do a figural that is simply an interesting shape like this pinwheel.

Nancy: That almost looks like an octopus.

Roz: So people started doing figurals and more interesting shapes. Now, with the use of laser cutters, you can get some really intricate shapes. A hand scroll saw cutter can't cut as finely as a laser can cut. They’re starting to branch out into other materials. You used to have just your cardboard puzzles and now they're getting into acrylics, metal, combinations of materials. You'll have a puzzle that's made up of both metal and acrylic pieces. 

This is a good time to talk about puzzles that have no end, known as infinity puzzles. I was practicing a minute ago so that I could do one of these shifts.

This is an irregular-edged puzzle and it's actually double-sided.  It is an intricate design using the same colors, so you don’t know initially whether your pieces are right-side up or right-side down. That plays into the fact that you can take a piece off one end, flip it over, and it will fit in somewhere else on the puzzle. 

I took a piece from one place and I fit it into another place and you can just keep moving pieces around. This will take different shapes, depending upon where that piece fits, so you're never actually done. You could call this one done—all the pieces are put together right—or you could say, “I want to see if this will turn into something that's more circular or can I string it out” or whatever. That's something that's being made by a company called N-E-R-V-O-U-S System that does a lot of their design work using computer algorithms. I don’t know how they do it, but they program a computer to draw and come up with a coloring they like and set it up on a laser and just let the laser cut away. I think you found one, Nancy, during your research that you found fascinating. It’s called the Earth puzzle. The way they spread it out is like taking a round shape and laying it out flat.

Nancy: Yes, and they have these wonderful little animal shapes—for example, a little kangaroo goes where Australia is. They have all these animal shapes that are appropriate to whatever continent they're on. It's so clever and really complex.

Roz: Yes, they’re a fascinating company. They’re a middle-aged couple now, but were among the first, I think, to use lasers and computer-generated designs. There are other really good laser companies out there that produce incredibly intricate patterned pieces. The advantage to a laser-cut puzzle is that it will be less expensive for you to purchase than a custom-cut because with a laser you can just turn the machine on and let it cut one after another. It’s very fast and not labor intensive, which allows people to purchase nice wooden puzzles at a reasonable price.  The real work is pretty much in the design.  

Here is a box made by a brand called Artifact Puzzles. This one has 207 pieces in it; you can probably buy that for $35 plus shipping. A 200-piece hand-cut puzzle would probably cost you somewhere between $300 and $400 because the pricing nowadays on hand cut is usually somewhere around $1.50 per piece. But the advantage of a hand-cut one is that if you make contact with the cutter, you can have your choice of a picture and the figural pieces put into it, which is really nice for people who are giving them as gifts. You know that that puzzle has been created for you with a lot of thought, emotion, and kindness. There is a lot of feeling behind the making of a hand-cut wooden puzzle.

Nancy: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Puzzle Parley, and then I want to go into tips on how you approach doing puzzles.

Roz: Sure. I mentioned earlier that one of the avenues that helped me get better as a puzzle cutter was to have discovered a group called the Puzzle Parley. Back in 1994, a woman who’d taken up puzzle cutting in her 70s was communicating with a few other puzzle cutters at that time. She got together with some of them and said, “We should be sharing our information, our techniques and our discoveries.” This group of about a dozen people met together a couple of decades ago.

Nancy: And they met in Concord!

Roz: Yes, they met in Concord, MA, where Nancy and I are both from. I did not know anything about them back when they were first meeting in the 1990s, but since then the group has grown and we have the Puzzle Parley. I'm now very much a part of it—I'm on the steering committee. Every two years we plan an in-person gathering. Just this last July we were in Sturbridge, MA, and we had 130 people. We attract people who are puzzle enthusiasts, historians, collectors, and crafters, so it's a nice mix of people. Fortunately, thanks to Facebook and the internet and all the social media, we're now attracting a really nice group of young people. We had probably 50 people who had never come to a Puzzle Parley before at this last one.

Nancy: Can you say a word about how COVID really shifted the puzzle world?

Roz: COVID just turned the puzzle world upside down for a little while because people were stuck at home, tired of reading books, and remembered puzzles. Suddenly companies were cleaned out of their inventory and couldn't keep up. If you were a company with multiple employees that was shut down for a while, you couldn’t produce more puzzles. So, during the first year of COVID puzzles were just flying out the door. Gradually that began to subside. Now a whole lot of people discovered more about puzzles and started to be more discerning in the kind of puzzles that they wanted to do. They were no longer just doing cardboard puzzles—they were looking for wooden ones. COVID really did change the puzzle world and I think that's partly why there are some young people involved in it now. 

Another thing that's happened is speed puzzling. That's something that can be done online. People are now getting back to gathering in large groups and competing to see who can put together the same puzzle the fastest. So COVID really did affect the puzzle world and it affected the Puzzle Parley. We were supposed to have a meet-up in 2020 but cancelled it. People were disappointed, so we decided to do a virtual one in 2021. We had our usual guest speakers and had “Show and Tell,” all done virtually. People were very thankful for that, including the international crowd. We had people Zooming in from Australia, Europe, and the West Coast, people who otherwise wouldn’t travel to one in person. It made a big difference and expanded people’s knowledge of puzzles. 

This year we did not do an online component to the Puzzle Parley, but I am guessing that in the future we will do a hybrid situation where we can provide the programming in real time to people who can't come in person. One thing we do is post all our sessions to our Puzzle Parley YouTube channel. We haven't gotten 2022 up online yet but you can see 2021 and earlier Parleys. There is a wealth of information at puzzleparley.org.

Nancy: In our last couple of minutes, why don't you give us an idea of how you approach challenging puzzles where you don't have a picture to go on so you have to figure it out by trial and error.  

Roz: It's fun to cut them knowing that people are not going to have the picture. It's fun to try to figure out a way to make it harder for someone to know what's going to happen. 

This is one of the ones that I cut for the group. It was the first time I had done a push-fit puzzle for the group, so they were also faced with a new cutting style. With something like this you look for places that line up. Perhaps you’re able to start with putting together your border.  When I’m putting together a puzzle that I’ve rented or purchased and don’t have the picture, I put all the pieces out and grab one random piece. I start working from that piece and try to build it out from there. It works if you have about 300 or 400 pieces; if it’s more than that it’s really hard to do a puzzle that way. 

Most people either have a color or shape bias; in other words, they're drawn to the colors and want to find where colors match up. Other people are taken by the shape and will look for where it plays into the assembly of the puzzle. Of course, you're really doing both, but one may be a little more dominant. When you don't know whether you have an irregular or a straight edge, look for how many straight-sided pieces there are. If there are not a lot, then you probably have an irregular edge. 

This is a puzzle I made for a friend who’d made these fish and sent me a photo of it. I decided to surprise her by making it into a puzzle. You can see that it has straight edges but no 90-degree angles. If you like to begin puzzles by assembling the edge/perimeter first, you will soon find there are not four corners and that may stump you for a while.

This was one that I cut for the group. This was actually a tricky one because it not only had the irregular edge, but I cut out a Christmas tree in the middle and threw that away so when you put it together there was a void in the shape of a tree. That’s called a dropout. 

Another tricky thing you can do is color line cutting: if I cut right on the color line, color is not part of your clue as to where this piece will fit against this one. Color line cutting is an old but really good trick. It's fun when you have something that has definite color changes to it.

Nancy: We're running short on time. I want to find out what are the things that you look forward to doing to challenge yourself within the puzzling world. 

Roz: I just wanted to show one other variation in puzzles nowadays, which is basically a 3D-puzzle. 

It's got multiple layers, so these top puzzle pieces are on top of three more layers. Each layer is its own puzzle making up the flowing river.  So you dump this out and then you're not putting a flat puzzle together, you're building layers. So that's a great one by a guy named Chris Yates who now lives in Montana. He moved out there a couple of years ago. 

What do I want to do next? I really look forward to the day when I can have more time in my puzzle room and try doing some of the things that I see when I go to the Puzzle Parley or that I see when I buy a puzzle from some other hand cutter who has a really neat style or trick. I have never done a double-sided puzzle with a picture on both sides nor a puzzle where there's more than one solution to it. I don’t mean the Infinity one, that just keeps going on and on, but one that could have more than one solution, like a dragon with a tail that can curl one way or another. There are some things that other people have done that I've never figured out how to do, so I look forward to doing those, like multilayer puzzles. 

Nancy: I am looking forward in a couple of months to getting another puzzle from you in the mail and setting aside probably more than an hour and a half to finish it! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, ideas, and experience with all of us, Roz, and I look forward to hearing more about your puzzling in the future.

Roz: I hope that those who view this will jump onto the Internet and look for some fun puzzles. Now that everybody's inventory is getting built up again, it's a good time to get into it and realize that there's more to it than a lot of folks realize. Maybe some of you will take up puzzle cutting as well!

Nancy: Thank you, Roz, and take care.

Roz: Thanks, Nancy. Good to see you. Bye!