I’ve been working on the Castle of Horror, and I’m enjoying it very much. Progress has been a bit slow, but I’ll get there.
One brilliant detail is the elderly couple having their tea, completely unfazed by the mayhem going on all around them 🙂
I watched the third season of the Crown, and it finally happened! Her Majesty is working on a puzzle while on the phone to her sister Margaret. As usual, you can’t see the image, but she appears to be working on a tray.
This is part of a Clementoni series with a blank, black space in the middle.
Apparently, you’re supposed to write on the blank part yourself. Can’t really see this catching on…
The puzzle itself was enjoyable, and with Clementoni quality even the black part in the middle wasn’t too difficult.
This puzzle shows a board game that every Finnish child has played since it was released in 1951. There are round markers that are distributed on the red dots, and one of those represents the Star of Africa, a diamond, and the object is to find the diamond and bring it back to your starting point (for which you may choose Tangier or Cairo). In addition to the diamond, you may find lesser jewels that can be sold, and then you can fly, or take a boat, to get around faster. You can also turn up a robber and lose all your money. It’s a game of luck, not of skill.
As you can see, there are three different piece sizes, with the big pieces on top and the small on the bottom. The small pieces were really tiny. The quality isn’t that good (as usual with Peliko), but it was still great fun. I’ve played the game countless times as a child, and later as an adult with various children. I especially remember how the 3-4-year-old son of some friends had a meltdown after losing all his money to a robber, sweeping the entire game onto the floor. I remember thinking this is one way Finnish children learn to deal with disappointment, I’m sure I’ve done the same as a child 🙂 It’s also possible to play without the robbers.
Even though the game represents lovely childhood memories to me, it has been pointed out that it can also be seen as an example of European colonialism, with Europeans robbing the wealth of Africa.
According to WordPress, I’ve now posted every day for 365 days, and I would like to thank everyone who has read or commented on this blog. I never expected to keep it up this long, in fact, I never intended to post every day at all, but I got inspired by Stacey at My Jigsaw Journal. But it was never going to be sustainable for me, and now that I’ve used all my old photos, I’m going to cut back quite a lot. I will also have less time for puzzling, as we have a big project at work that will mean long hours during the next 10 months or so. Also, I would like to read a bit more. I will still be puzzling, of course, and I’ve decided I will post every Friday, and sometimes also on Tuesday, depending on how much I’ve been puzzling.
Here’s an interesting little art project that I saw on the wall of a building in 2014 near where I live in Helsinki:
I remember seeing it a few years later, and it looked like you would expect puzzle pieces to look after being subjected to rain and snow for a while: the image layer was gone, but there was still something left of the cardboard. Unfortunately, I have no photo of that, and when I walked past the place recently, I could no longer find the spot where this was in 2014.
I’ll be back the day after tomorrow!
This was a great, unique puzzle. The images are photos taken from space by French astronaut Thomas Pasquet. There was a similar 500-piece puzzle, and I’m now kicking myself for not getting that as well. They are now both out of print.
I’ve done a few Titanic puzzles, but this is probably the best so far. Clementoni is an excellent brand, and there are many interesting details in the image. Text is always a huge plus 🙂 I really loved this, and will probably do it again one day.
Christmassy food collage by Eurographics. Enjoyable, even if I may have done too many of these food collages to get excited about them anymore.
A painting by Robert Delaunay from 1930. This worked great as a puzzle and I enjoyed it very much.
There was one strange thing, though. We all know about pieces that fit where they don’t belong, but here I had the inverse problem of a piece not quite fitting where it very definitely does belong. Even though the photo is a bit blurred, you can see that two of the edge pieces don’t quite fit. There weren’t many edge pieces of this particular colour, though, and this was the only way to put them together that worked .
This took me almost two months, must be my record for a 1000 piece puzzle 🙂 It was really difficult, Mordillo’s big nose characters are difficult to tell apart. I did this in honour of the 2016 European Championship, and ended up finishing after the tournament was over, on the day of the final. I did some other puzzles in between, of course.
Protests in various languages by my favourite artist Marino Degano. This was originally released in 1994 as a 4000 piece puzzle called Pro and Contra.
There’s a bit of advertising here “Fun for hours on end – Heye Puzzle”, fighting peace protesters, and also a couple of football fans. Below on the left, a guy holds a sign saying Aux chiottes l’arbitre (To hell with the referee in French), and he’s wearing an Adidas shirt. From the colours, I thought of Bayern Munich first, but since the sign is in French, it may be a French team that I don’t know. The guy next to him is definitely a Juventus fan. Then there’s the lady holding up the Hamburg forever sign – may or may not be football-related.
An elephant holds up a sign that says “You have to be completely insane to do a puzzle like this” in German 🙂
Puzzler1909 