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That evening I toddled off to the Puzzle Party at Gossip Bar
NYC, leaving Gill to some QT on her own in the hotel. It turned out I was the
first to arrive, so I set myself up at the bar with a cold drink and caught my
breath after the brisk walk cross-town. A short while later Viktor Genel
arrived and we started chatting about puzzles and he hauled out some of his
designs that had been beautifully made by Wayne Daniel. The Deschamps’ arrived
and the rest of the NYC tour group arrived pretty much en-masse just after
that, pretty much filling the place in a couple of minutes. Just after the
arrival of the main bunch, I spotted someone who looked just like Jane Kostick
and when I caught her eye and pointed at my name on my snazzy MPP polo shirt
her face lit up in recognition and she came straight over.
A little quirk of fate resulted in us sitting at a quieter
table at one end of the room, where a few others who arrived a bit later found
themselves as well. I ended up having a wonderful long chat with Jane about IPP
(I may have been a bit gushing!), the designs she’d entered in the competition,
their development and our families. It was so nice to chat with someone who was
so obviously passionate about her craft and knew her way around her designs and
their geometry backwards. Quite often she’d be chatting about something else
entirely while almost absent-mindedly assembling a structure almost without
paying it any attention at all. Not content with assembling them one way, she’d
often take them apart and produce alternative assemblies using the same pieces.
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Jane marks herself out as a pretty awesome craftsman through
her work as well as her amazing knowledge about the geometries she uses. She
enjoyed telling us about some trees she’d discovered recently that grow with
square and triangular growth rings on them, and then fished around in a bag of
bits and came out with the pair in the pic below, one with a clear triangular
set of rings and the other with a rather clear square pattern. We pretty much
all called her bluff and she happily showed everyone how she’d cut the wood to
achieve the patterns, adding that once you’d done the sums and realised that
you needed to simply cut at thirty five and a quarter degrees to the grain,
you’d be fine .... thirty five, and a
quarter degrees!
During the course of the evening I’d returned her puzzles from
the Design Competition to her and asked about buying one of them and was
thoroughly delighted when she sold the best one of the lot to me – the 3 Layer
Tetraxis Array from the competition – and a bit taken aback when she insisted
that I take the bronze Emperor Star that had acted as its stand as well,
“because John thought they really went beautifully together and it would be a
shame to split them up”. WOW. I was totally bowled over when she proceeded
to open the unopened spare set of puzzles from the competition and take out the
Chamfered Cube from that set and give it to me as a gift, because she thought
that one had the best combination of woods and was a bit disappointed that
no-one had gotten to see it at the competition...
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It really was a treat getting to spend so much time with
Jane chatting about her work, her craft and life in general, and meeting her
friend Muli who was clearly so proud of what her college friend is doing.
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We all hung around chatting until Brett had to almost
physically shoo us out of the restaurant about an hour after our NYC Puzzle
Party was supposed to have ended. Thanks
Brett, it was a great evening from where I was sitting! And congratulations on
not losing any of the ducklings! :-)
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