I started working on this Ravensburger 9000-piece puzzle in April 2009, and I finished in January 2010.
World Map 1611, 2010-01-15
Month: December 2018
Moomin Cartoon, 2018-12-19
Tove Jansson was a great lady. I remember seeing an interview with her when she was already quite old, and the reporter asked something slightly patronizing about wrinkles. She pulled herself up in mock outrage and said “Wrinkles? Wrinkles? I only have one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it!”. She was a national treasure. (I seem to be promoting a lot of Finnish artists – it certainly wasn’t my intention when I started the blog 🙂
Anyway, back to the puzzle. Like the previous Peliko puzzles, this is also of quite poor quality, with thin pieces. Again, the image prevents pieces fitting where they don’t belong being a problem.
Some images appeared multiple times.
I like their images enough to keep doing these puzzles anyway 🙂
Da Vinci Collage, In progress
I wasn’t able to finish the Da Vinci Collage, but good progress. All the remaining pieces are various shades of brown, grey and black… I’ll be back to finish it after Christmas.
Modern Rome, 2008-03-21
This puzzle shows a painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini from 1757. It is a picture gallery with paintings showing Rome. In English, the painting is known as Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, or Modern Rome for short. There are three different versions of the painting. In the version pictured on Wikipedia the Fontana di Trevi, for example, is on the left side, whereas on this version it’s the painting in the lower right-hand corner.
I really liked the idea of paintings within the painting, sort of like doing many smaller puzzles, although the pictures were similar enough in colouring that it was impossible to pick out the pieces for one particular picture. I remember pulling all the pieces with sky and all the pieces with vegetation and so on. First I did the red and blue cloth in the foreground. It was a really difficult puzzle, so difficult, in fact, that I started it twice.
I eventually put it back in the box, and got it back out after Christmas, on December 27th 2007. Took me almost three months to finish, not counting the first attempt.
Clementoni’s Ethnic Collection
About 10 years ago, Clementoni had a series called Ethnic Collection. The images always looked like they were painted on wood, and they represented various cultures seen as exotic from a European perspective. I had two puzzles from the series:
In addition, there were at least a couple of puzzles with African themes (one was Kilimanjaro) and one with an Indian theme (Taj Mahal, obviously).
The Largest One So Far
The largest puzzle I’ve ever completed was The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, 10 000 pieces. It was produced by Educa in 1997, and it was, at the time, the world’s largest puzzle, at least according to the box. According to Rare Puzzles, there is a 9000-piece version available, but the 10 000-piece one is very rare. I still have mine, and I’m not selling 🙂
I bought the puzzle in the late 90s, but it took me more than 10 years to work up the courage to actually assemble it. The pieces were in 5 bags of 2000 each. I didn’t mix the bags and essentially completed five 2000-piece puzzles. I started on November 29th, 2011, and finished on January 12th, 2012. Once I got started, I was amazed at how fast it went.
Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the different stages, just the completed puzzle:
I have every intention of assembling this again one day – and then it will be much more difficult. I did not take it apart in sections, so next time it really will be one 10 000-piece puzzle instead of five 2000-piece ones…
Humphrey Bogart, 2018-09-13
For the next week or so I’m not expecting to get much puzzling done. I’m doing other fun things though, going to soccer games, visiting friends, singing Christmas carols in the stadium with 50 000 other fans, and baking cakes 🙂 I still have pictures of puzzles I’ve completed earlier, though, and I’ll be putting up some of those.
I got this one from a friend who did not enjoy it at all. She was like “Take this puzzle, I never want to see it again”. I quite enjoyed it 🙂 The face was the most difficult part, everwhere else there were plenty of clues, like text or the shade of the background colour changing.
I used to dislike doing close-ups of faces, but I seem to have gotten over that.
Heye Portraits
About 10 years ago, Heye had a series of four 1000 piece puzzles with historical portraits. I tried a bit of Googling, but couldn’t find any information (such as year of release) about them.
I have to say I don’t remember much about these, but I must have enjoyed them as I completed the whole series. The frames look like something I would not be too keen on, but it can’t have been too bad, as I don’t remember them. Then again, it is over 10 years since I did the last one 🙂
Christmas Decorations, 2018-12-11
A 500 piece puzzle from Finnish manufacturer Peliko.
The artist, Mauri Kunnas, is a very successful illustrator of children’s books in Finland. Before he turned to children’s books he used to do a very popular comic strip in a youth magazine in the 70s and 80s. The comics were usually parodies of movies, TV-series or bands.
I wish they had chosen images from his earlier works for puzzles 🙂
Mashup, Vol 2
Turns out, Castorland also uses the same dies for 500 piece puzzles, but in this case, the puzzles fit on each other so that the other image needs to be upside down. That was something I hadn’t considered. The two jigsaws I used were Sunset Harbour and The Stony Bridge.
These work a bit better than the previous ones, but nothing spectacular yet. The puzzle mashup artist, Tim Klein, did say that he preferred older puzzles because new ones are so busy and full of detail. I think he’s right, this mashup thing would probably work better with less stuff in the images, to begin with. I kind of like the sunshade landing in the garden, though.
Puzzler1909 