Joan Steiner

"I got started doing puzzles when I was working as a free-lance magazine illustrator,” Steiner says. “An editor challenged me to come up with some sort of puzzle or game. I had always flirted with the idea of one thing looking like another, and here was an opportunity to take it to the max and make a whole little world where everything actually was something else. “People ask me where I get my ideas,” she adds, “and I really have to say that I don’t know. Sometimes I have a ‘eureka moment’ when something hits me out of the blue. Driving down the road one day, I saw a cement mixer and suddenly it hit me ‘plastic mustard jar!’ Another time, while cooking dinner, I noticed that the lasagna noodles looked a lot like frilly draperies; that eventually led me to construct a parlor scene. “Other times, I really have to work hard for my ideas. I spend hours and hours ‘shopping’, going up and down the aisles of stores, and I may spend ten minutes inspecting a mousetrap or a cheese curl, turning it every which way, trying to see if it would work.”