Resident has puzzling hobby




JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers  I DID IT-Westlake Village resident Donna Jessee took seven month to complete this 4,000-piece puzzle. And Jessee already has begun her next challenge: a puzzle with 2,000 pieces.

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers I DID IT-Westlake Village resident Donna Jessee took seven month to complete this 4,000-piece puzzle. And Jessee already has begun her next challenge: a puzzle with 2,000 pieces.


By Sophia Fischer
sfischer@theacorn.com

For Westlake Village resident Donna Jessee, the jig is up—literally.


Jessee loves to work on jigsaw puzzles and just recently completed her largest undertaking ever: a Wild West scene with 4,000 pieces.


The "Go West" puzzle is 53 inches by 38 inches and took her seven months to finish. And she nearly didn’t.


"It’s a very busy puzzle, but I just persevered," Jessee said. The puzzle was a gift from her tap dance teacher at the Goebel Senior Center in Thousand Oaks.


"It depicts the joining of the two railroad lines, the Indians, buffalo, a stagecoach, horses, the Cavalry, a surveyor."


By her own estimates, Jessee has worked on hundreds, if not thousands of jigsaw puzzles since her childhood. But this one was special.


"Go West" started out on the dining room table, but as Christmas approached, Jessee’s husband suggested the project be moved so the family could enjoy the holiday around the table.


He brought home a plywood board and Jessee transferred the puzzle pieces before moving the whole thing to the family room.


Despite his help, Jessee’s husband had little other involvement in his wife’s big project.


"My husband on occasion will stand at the puzzle for about five minutes," Jessee said. "He will get a piece but he doesn’t have the time or the patience (to finish it)."


Jessee is carrying on a hobby that began in England in 1767, according to the American Jigsaw Puzzle Society. A teacher named John Spilsbury created the first puzzle to teach his students about geography. Using a fine saw, he cut a flat hardboard into pieces representing a map of England and Wales.


Others picked up on his idea, creating pictorial jigsaw puzzles for entertainment. Interlocking puzzle pieces did not come into existence until the advent of power tools more than 100 years later.


"The Jigsaw Puzzle," a book by Anne Williams, credits the hobby with being a catalyst for women’s emancipation from the home. Women made puzzles with small treadle-powered saws and sold them for profit or for charity.


The cardboard wonders were also used by Ellis Island doctors to determine immigrants’ mental well-being. Later, Americans turned to puzzles during the Depression to help them take their minds off their troubles.


There are no published statistics for how many puzzle fans exist, but Jessee is in good company. Among the more famous puzzlers are author Stephen King, Queen Elizabeth II, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.


The most common puzzle sizes for experienced puzzlers is 1,000 to 3,000 pieces, according to the puzzle society. The largest puzzles range from 13,200 pieces by the Clementoni company of Italy, to a four-panel 18,000 piece puzzle by a German firm called Ravensburger.


For Jesse, the satisfaction comes in the actual process rather than the finished product. Searching for that hard-to-find piece is part of the fun.


"I’m a very detailed person. I get a lot of satisfaction out of this," she said.


When starting a new puzzle, Jessee has a system. First, she puts together the border. She then organizes the remaining pieces, dividing them by shape, separating them by various indentations and knobs. When working on a particular section, she looks for pieces by color.


Jessee spends some time nearly every night working on puzzles; she’s not much of a TV watcher.


As a child, Jessee used to travel from her home in Cleveland to a summer home in Michigan to spend time with relatives. On rainy days the family did puzzles to pass the time. Jesse has done them ever since, continuing the family tradition with her sister when they visit their summer home in Idyllwild.


Her favorite puzzle is one her daughter gave her: a four-sided murder mystery. By following clues written on the puzzle, the viewer can solve the mystery.


Jessee has glued some of her completed puzzles and hung them in her home; others she takes apart and puts away to do over again. She plans to dismantle the "Go West" puzzle sand donate it to the Senior Concerns thrift shop in Thousand Oaks.


"I have six puzzles people have given me that I haven’t opened yet," Jessee said. "It’s very relaxing and something that I get a lot of satisfaction out of."


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