Meet the 32-year-old who became a professional puzzler and now competes in jigsaw championships.
Karen Kavett has always loved puzzles and she turned her hobby into her job, after sharing videos of her skills over the last five years.
The Los Angeles-based content creator likes to try her hand at jigsaws with a twist—such as gradient and patterned puzzles—and has even completed one with her feet.
She’s so good that when she competed in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships in San Diego, California in October, she finished in second place even though her entire puzzle edge fell on the floor. She clocked a time of 50 minutes for the 500-piece puzzle while competing against 99 top puzzlers.
“I was less than a minute away from winning,” said told SWNS news. “It was so exciting and so validating after the many hours I have spent doing puzzles.”
During the lockdown puzzle boom, Karen decided to focus her YouTube channel on her hobby after she discovered their popularity. She says “people like to see me suffer and try tricky puzzles”.
She uses time-lapse to creates satisfying videos for her 202,000 subscribers, including her quest to finish a 24,000-piece puzzle (which took 157 hours) and a 9,000-piece Despicable Me jigsaw that took 67 hours.
A second bedroom in her home has been turned into her puzzle studio, where she has even completed a tiny puzzle that she needed to do with tweezers. (Watch a great video below…)
She became part of a global community of speed puzzlers and hopes to compete in the world championships this year.
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Karen has now designed her own puzzle and was able to complete it herself for the first time recently.
“It was so surreal solving my puzzle for the first time,” she said. “It’s a puzzle of a puzzle.
Karen continues to grow her puzzle collection, consisting of around 400 jigsaws—and gives away dozens that she doesn’t want to keep.
See the most difficult puzzle she ever tried in the video below—a plain brown one with weird shapes that she will definitely be giving away. “I’ll never be doing this puzzle EVER again,” she joked.
INSPIRE Your Friends to Turn Their Hobby into a Gig By Sharing on Social Media…
She needs to fundraise for those 4 British men who rowed across the Atlantic for charity. Amazing what online content creators can do today for incomes.