Jigsaw puzzle:In the Garden

Harriet May Taylor Eagleson (1872-1941) cut wooden jigsaw puzzles beginning in the 1920s. Like other home crafters of puzzles during the era, she often utilized pictures from magazines. Living in Massachusetts, she visited printing houses in Boston and purchased leftover calendar pictures from previous years. She glued the pictures to plywood with home-made flour paste, and then placed the uncut puzzles under the family''s dining room carpet for a week, to press the image permanently to the wood base. Her puzzles are characterized by color-line cuts and shaped pieces which add difficulty to their assembly. She''d cleverly insert a straight-edged piece in the body of the puzzle, to confound a puzzler searching for a flat border edge. While Eagleson''s jigsaw puzzles are typical of wooden examples from this period, they show consistent quality cutting and hint at her enthusiasm for this craft. She helped pay for her children''s schooling with profits from her puzzles, which she both sold and rented.