Not much progress, but I finished the edges.
Also, I pulled the pieces for the birds a long time ago, but only now did I put most of them together. Even managed to connect some of them to other bits!
Now I’m working on the pinkish area at the bottom.
Great vintage train puzzle, I love the style, and it was also a pretty easy puzzle.
Tactic had a series with album covers of Finnish bands, where you get a 300 piece puzzle and the album as a CD. The series has been discontinued, but you can still find them second hand. Most of the covers don’t make great puzzles (so much black), but this was interesting.
The band, Sielun Veljet (Soul Brothers, although “soul” doesn’t refer to a type of music in Finnish, and their music was definitely not soul), is one of my all-time favourites and one of the most successful Finnish bands ever. Most of their stuff is in Finnish, but this album has English lyrics. You can probably guess that their music is quite strange from the title: Softwood Music Under Slow Pillars. They were impossible to put into any one genre, and the word “shamanistic” was often used when someone tried to describe them. They were also a brilliant live act!
The edges, as well as top and bottom, were really easy, the rest took a while, but it was only 300 pieces, after all.
The box contains the puzzle and a CD.
On the back of the box is this brilliant image that I used to have on my wall in the 80’s. I was so happy to see it again!
This is definitely something different, but I’m afraid I didn’t find it that enjoyable, I don’t know why.
Two weeks ago I mentioned on the blog that the ice hockey world championship was about to start. Well, against all odds, Finland won! None of the big Finnish NHL stars wanted in, and 18 of 25 players were first-timers. Still, they managed to beat Sweden (21 NHL players), Russia (title favourites) and finally Canada in the final. In the end, hard work and team play beat star-studded opponents. Amazing!
Also, I managed to finish my Egyptian collage. The section below on the right, Tutankhamun in the middle and the two sections above and below him turned out to be pretty easy. For the remaining five I could sort the pieces into two piles, one for the two images with grey stone and one for the three remaining images with yellowish stone. It wasn’t all that easy, but still enjoyable from start to finish!
The Aztec Cosmos, also known as the Aztec Calendar (it’s a calendar, but also sort of a map of the universe). This was hard, especially the black part. Pieces would fit where they didn’t belong, which surprised me because I had only heard good things about Pomegranate (this was the first I did). My second Pomegranate did not have this problem, in fact, the quality was great.
Optical illusion puzzle, where a sitting woman also forms a skull. In the background, there is bread that looks like skulls. There was a lot of dark in this, it was pretty difficult.
I started on a 2000-piece Egyptian collage by Grafika.
The pieces for these two sections were pretty easy to pull, but it’s going to get a lot harder from now on.
In the late 90s, there were two Ravensburger 9000 piece puzzles, one of an old map, and one with the Tower of Babel. I wanted both of them, but I could only afford one, and I got the map. Later the Tower of Babel became available as a 5000 piece puzzle, and that’s when I bought it.
While working on this I was eventually very happy that it was “only” 5000 pieces and not 9000. It took me over a year (sometimes I wouldn’t touch it for months), and it was quite challenging, but somehow I finished it.
Grafika has a huge, 48 000 piece puzzle with images from around the world. I’m not up for that, but the images are also available as 1000, 1500 and 2000 piece puzzles. This is the image for Japan.
Puzzler1909 