One of my earliest memories, when I was not much taller than a card table,
is of helping my grandmother and big brother
put together jigsaw puzzles. They would coach me to try this piece in a particular spot,
and of course, when I fiddled with it and rotated it just right, it magically fit and
everyone cheered. I was soon doing them either with other family members or by
myself and continued to do
them as I grew up and as my own children grew
up.
However, I had never really known the truly
wonderful hand-cut puzzles that were made for adults since the early 1900's.
Mine were mostly the regular
cardboard puzzles with knobs or holes on four
sides, or the thick, squiggly-shaped TUCO's. In the late nineties it dawned on me that an enterprising antique dealer might be using
the latest app, Ebay, to sell some of the same puzzles I'd lost as a child when we moved. Sure enough, there they were along with all these
truely remarkable hand cut wooden puzzles.
Thus began my wooden jigsaw puzzle collection.
But, being an
engineer at heart, I wanted to create some of
my own.
In October of 1999 I bought a saw and began cutting puzzles. My first puzzle was a modest 5x7 with about 100 pieces. There were no figurals, the edges of the puzzles were as straight as I could get them, and since I hadn't really studied cutting styles, it was mostly free form. I was just happy I hadn't cut any of the knobs off or made any other typical beginner errors.
By Christmas time, I was putting in figural pieces and experimenting with different cutting styles, creative edges, and all the other features the top cutters put into their puzzles. My son's Christmas present was a 500+ piece puzzle with irregular-edged, bellowing clouds at the top and a large multi-piece fire-breathing dragon figural hidden in the sky.
You may wonder how I chose the name Jardin Puzzles. I grew up
in Vermont, where the short winter days and
long winter nights are great for puzzling.
It was also great for gardening in the
summer. My grandmother and I loved iris so I picked a stylized iris
as my signature piece. 
For those of you who
know French, "jardin" means "garden" which continued the flower theme.
Over the next two and a half decades, I cut over 1000 puzzles and well over a hundred thousand pieces, all by hand, one piece at a time. I'm not cutting much anymore, in fact, I'm trying to downsize my collection of antique and vintage puzzles. You can find any currently for sale on Melinda's Other Puzzles. The rest of the site shows many of the puzzles I cut.
Enjoy,
Melinda Shebell
