Nice little Ravensburger puzzle. I did the sky first, the boats in the foreground next and the village last. Enjoyable, even though the image isn’t all that exciting 🙂
Colorful Marina, Ravensburger, 500 pieces. Completed on April 12, 2020.
I recently put a bunch of puzzles up for sale, and within a few hours, no less than three people wanted to buy this. Makes me think I’ve missed something 🙂 Seriously though, I’ve sold puzzles before, but this time it was crazy. Within 16 hours there were only 4 puzzles of 27 left that were not sold or reserved. I guess it’s true a lot of people are getting into puzzles right now 🙂
A poster for an opera “gala” in Paris in 1886 by Eugène Grasset. It made for a very enjoyable puzzle, and it was just the right amount of challenging. I loved it! I did the text with the yellow background first, that was easy to pick out, but as for the rest, I just picked a few pieces with the same colouring and got a few pieces in here and there.
Les Fêtes de Paris, 1886 by Eugène Grasset
A funny thing happened at the start. I did the edges first and thought I was done, but pretty far into the puzzle I noticed that I had placed one of the edge pieces wrong and that I was still missing (at least) one edge piece. As soon as I knew I was missing an edge piece, I found it almost immediately, although I had gone over the pieces many times already and not seen the edge piece. Sometimes I think I always find the pieces I’m not looking for, but this time it worked like it’s supposed to 🙂
The coat of arms of Paris, which has actually already made an appearance on this blog:
The Latin phrase Fluctuat nec mergitur means “It is tossed [by the waves] but does not sink”
Another colour collage from the Andrea Tilk Collection. I’ve done the yellow and the red before. They have all been really enjoyable, and not nearly as difficult as you might think with mostly shades of the same colour. The variation in texture is enough to distinguish the different objects, and the puzzles are actually quite easy. This is perhaps the easiest, there is even some text. Loved it!
Brilliant Blue by Andrea Tilk, Heye, 500 pieces. Completed on March 21, 2020.
Last weekend the Bundesliga kicked off again after it stopped in March, the first of the big soccer leagues to do so. The stadiums remain empty and the players are tested for Corona every other day. One trainer couldn’t coach his team because he broke quarantine to go out and buy toothpaste. Everything feels very strange. Since there is virtually no other live sports anywhere, interest was enormous not only in Germany, but internationally as well, and I’ve never seen so many images of the Westfalenstadion in Finnish newspapers 🙂
Dortmund’s first game after the restart was against local arch-rivals Schalke, the so-called Revierderby, one of the most highly anticipated games in Germany. These games are usually very emotional affairs, and you can feel the build-up for at least a week before the game in the whole region. The games themselves are sometimes legendary, but it also happens that everyone is so afraid of losing that the result is a tired 0-0. The game should have been played in March, and I had a ticket, but now I had to watch it on television.
After some traumatic events in the last two years, Dortmund won resoundingly with 4-0 on Saturday. To celebrate, here’s the championship puzzle from 2011 again. (As soon as Ravensburger puts out another great Dortmund puzzle there will be some variety, but until then you will probably have to put up with this rerun every year in May.)
Deutscher Meister 2011, Ravensburger, 1000 pieces. Completed on May 18th, 2020.
Of the players from 2011, three were on the pitch on Saturday (all defenders):
Lukasz Piszczek on the left, on the right fair-haired Marcel Schmelzer, and behind him Mats Hummels (he was gone for a while, but is now back in Dortmund). The last of the core defenders of the 2011 team, Neven Subotic (yellow cap in the image on the right), is technically no longer at Dortmund, but in Dortmund, he will always count as one of us. After every game in Dortmund, even if he plays for the other team (currently Union Berlin), he will be celebrated with songs from the south stand. It’s very moving, I was actually there both times it’s happened so far.
I finished the second section in 23 days. The first section took twice as long, but that was mostly because I spent a lot of time in Dortmund, and I also did other puzzles in between. I liked this section more, it was very enjoyable from start almost to finish. The last 200 pieces, the dark parts of the statue, were actually quite hard, but I still preferred it to the palm trees in the first section. There will be more palm trees before I’m finished with this.
I think this image might look better in a smaller format because some of the photoshopping doesn’t look too good up close. The green stuff (no idea what it is) in the image below looks decidedly out of place.
When I bought this online, I thought the image was a photograph, but it turns out, it’s an illustration. I love the image! It would have been challenging with a larger piece count, but with 500 pieces it was quite easy.
Clever Women Are Dangerous Too by Joe de Mers, Clementoni, 500 pieces. Completed on February 23rd, 2020.
Googling the title I found out that both the title and the image are apparently from a magazine story by Jon Cleary, from 1950. “He was afraid of being trapped by some gorgeous birdbrain. He forgot that CLEVER WOMEN ARE DANGEROUS TOO“. I also found the name of the artist in the magazine, there is no mention of him on the box, and I couldn’t read the signature. Old magazine illustrations as puzzles is a great idea!
I really enjoyed this! It’s my second 350-piece Peliko with three different piece sizes, and I was expecting to have the big pieces on top like last time. What I didn’t think of was that the first puzzle was portrait format, whereas this is landscape, so instead, I have the big pieces on the left. I like the way the smallest pieces are in the bottom right-hand corner, and the further away you get from the large, sleeping goat, the larger the pieces become 🙂 Definitely more fun than I expected.
Blue Thoughts, Peliko, 350 pieces. Completed on March 25, 2020.
Antother week of progress on Paradise Sunset. I think I’m about halfway there. The easy bits are definitely done now, and I’m now in a phase where I don’t place any pieces for a long time, but then I often find 3-4 pieces really fast, then again nothing for a long time. I had heard that the dark statue in this section is the most difficult thing in the entire puzzle, but that must be the darker, lower part, because the top wasn’t that hard. I think the vegetation looks more difficult, but we’ll see.
Another Clementoni 500-piecer, enjoyable as always. This is a bit older (no more than about 20 years, there’s a website address on the box), and the cardboard is thicker than with the newer puzzles. The top layer has separated on some of the tabs, this is something I’ve seen before with older Clementonis.
Cordoba, Clementoni, 500 pieces. Completed on March 21, 2020.
Puzzler1909 