The story of the 40,320-piece puzzle

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s August 31.

My family and I went to the Summer Puzzle Challenge party at MLK Library on Saturday. The people running the show told me more than 200 people showed up for the two-hour event.

The puzzle is 40,320 pieces and about 22 feet long, comprised of scenes from 10 classic Disney movies. It was launched in March at Awesome Con — a festival that celebrates comics, anime and geek culture. Community puzzling continued this summer at 10 D.C. public libraries, each given a section of the puzzle:

On Saturday, the different parts of the puzzle were brought to be finished and joined together at MLK Library. I placed two pieces, both of them handed to me by other puzzlers who told me where the pieces went. I loved seeing so many puzzle nerds doing their thing, in the zone.

Yesterday, I talked to Crystal Sanchez, a cofounder of the DC Puzzle Swap group and an organizer of the Summer Puzzle Challenge, to learn more about how this entire project came to be.

She told me that Awesome Con, which hosted the USA Jigsaw Nationals in 2025, wanted to include puzzling at this year’s event and got the Disney puzzle donated by Ravensburger. The people at Awesome Con called Crystal a couple of weeks before the event to ask her help to organize a community build.

“I got about 50 volunteers. We went to Awesome Con. We had a huge room. We opened up the puzzle the day before. We learned that the way they deliver it is in 4,000-piece bags, so it’s really 10 4,000-piece puzzles,” she told me.

“We opened up half of the bags … they’re really hard – 3,000 pieces of water, 3,000 pieces of sky. We set them on big circle tables … We did about half of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and half of ‘The Little Mermaid’ at Awesome Con."

“Awesome Con said, ‘Do you want to keep this?’ So we packed it up and put it in my car … We kept all the sorting trays. It was in a weird state of 1/32 done.”

Crystal said she had to come up with a plan. Then one of MLK’s librarians called her about organizing a puzzle swap. Crystal, in turn, made her pitch about this giant puzzle and asked if D.C. might have 10 library branches to host community builds. A plan came together. The puzzles were distributed to the branches in June.

The goal was to finish the puzzle(s). But they were in public spaces, so pieces went missing, while some branches had problems with puzzles being dismantled, Crystal said. So the organizers set a new goal to bring the parts of the whole puzzle together, lay them out on tables and “just be excited about the size of this thing.”

Crystal picked the puzzles up last week. One branch asked for more time.

“Southwest did ‘Dumbo.’ I was supposed to pick it up Wednesday. They said, ‘We need a couple more days. We can finish it.’ I picked it up Saturday morning at 10 a.m. … ‘Dumbo’ was finished. They had a couple of hardcore puzzlers.”

The 10 movie scenes, each on their own foam boards, were set up in two long rows, five scenes on each. “Half were finished, three were almost done … and two were not done at all,” Crystal said.

Throughout Saturday, people kept toiling. Then at 4 p.m., though the puzzles weren’t completed, the two rows were brought together and gently connected.

Now, this puzzle is … to be continued, Crystal said.

“We left the scenes on their own foam boards, stacked them up and stored them. We need to think of another idea to activate it and continue the build … And that’s the story of the 40,000-piece puzzle.”

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Nancy DiPaolo, sent in this photo of last week’s lunar eclipse, taken at 11:59 p.m. from the front stoop of her house in South Arlington, Virginia.

“It was such a wonderful thing to watch, and I captured photos throughout the event,” she wrote in her submission.

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

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