Some more puzzles that I completed and photographed in the mid or late 90s:
As before, if anyone reading this happens to have some information about these puzzles I would be very happy to hear about it.
Mystery Puzzles, vol 2
Month: November 2018
Collage of Operas, 2018-09-06
I had actually decided not to get anymore Educa-puzzles because the pieces too often fit where they don’t belong, which I hate. Then I saw this, and thought, well, maybe just one more 🙂 With virtually no monochrome areas and very distinct details it is less of a problem that pieces fit in the wrong places, and I love the image.
I don’t often have pictures of unfinished puzzles from before I started this blog, but here’s one.
Gumpert’s Swarming Machine, 2018-10-25
This was unexpectedly difficult, especially the dark parts. I placed several pieces wrong and had to switch them later, but the issue wasn’t so much the quality of the puzzles as that I just wasn’t paying enough attention.
Set-up in Helsinki
In Helsinki, I have no table space available for puzzling, so I now use cardboard sheets both for spreading out the pieces and for assembling puzzles. I used to assemble puzzles on the floor, but I’m too old to spend hours on my knees crawling around. The floor was alright for 1000-1500 pieces, but with larger puzzles, there was also the problem of not being able to vacuum until the puzzle was finished. I once had a 5000 piece puzzle on the floor for about six months…
The sheets of cardboard that I use are 70 x 50 cm, which fits a 1000 piece puzzle of most European brands more or less exactly. For 1500 and 2000 pieces I need two sheets, and for 3000 pieces four sheets. The largest puzzle I’ve completed this way was 5000 pieces, on six sheets of cardboard. If you want to take a longer break from a puzzle, you just stack the sheets on top of each other and put the entire stack on top of a cupboard and forget about it until you’re ready to go on. I find the simple sheets of cardboard much more practical than any commercial alternatives, and believe me, I have tried them all. Many are unnecessarily heavy, and the ones where you roll up the puzzle work well for storing finished puzzles, but half-finished puzzles tend to fall apart, at least if I’m the one doing the rolling. My only problem with the cardboard is, that pieces sometimes fall off when you move them around, especially around the edges. That is why I almost never do the edges first anymore.
Because I now have the large table in Dortmund, I don’t do puzzles larger than 2000 pieces in Helsinki anymore.
Mystery Puzzles, vol 1
I have some photographs of finished puzzles where I no longer have the puzzles, or any idea of the name and / or brand. I completed these puzzles in the mid or late 90s, then snapped a picture but failed to record any details of the puzzles or when exactly I took the picture. Here they are:
If anyone reading this happens to have some information about these puzzles I would be very happy to hear about it.
Fly To Berlin, 2018-11-03
A few days early, but when I started, I didn’t even realize how close the anniversary of the wall coming down is. Accidentally topical 🙂
About Sorting
I used to sort. When I started a puzzle larger than 1000 pieces, I would start by sorting the pieces according to the colour into old flowerpots. I hated it. Not only was it tedious, but, as anyone who has ever done this knows, you will make a lot of mistakes, because your ability to correctly identify what colour goes where develops as you are working on the puzzle.
Because I am incredibly lazy, what irked me more than anything was that to sort a piece I would turn it the right way up, but after it went into the pot I was no better off than when I opened the box – some pieces with the picture side up, some not. I ended up turning the same pieces over many times and hated it.
After many, many years, I finally came up with a simple solution. I spread all the pieces out on sheets of cardboard and turned them the right way up. From these, I then pick whatever colour I am currently working on.
Sometimes I use a separate sheet to put the pieces I’ve picked. This way sorting becomes more flexible, and you can do it as needed while puzzling, not as a separate chore that I never enjoyed.
There is one situation where there is no way getting around sorting (in the sense of going through all pieces and assigning each to a category). When I have a monochrome area where the picture on the pieces is no help at all, I sort the pieces according to shape (“two pegs opposite” in one pile, “three pegs” in another and so on). Helps with the “brute force” approach often needed to complete the monochrome parts.
Puzzler1909 