Another unnamed puzzle (sigh). The puzzle itself was great fun, and of good quality.
[Underwater World], 2020-10-10
Month: January 2021
The Soul of the Rose, 2020-10-07
A beautiful painting by John William Waterhouse, painted in 1908. I was expecting the puzzle to be quite difficult, but it wasn’t that bad, really. I did the hair and skin first, and the darkest areas last.
Afternoon Tea, 2020-09-29
Nice image of afternoon tea and books with winter in the background. The cups and pot turned out to be the most difficult part. You can make out some of the book titles, there are a couple of Alexander Dumas books, for example. The tiny red one is supposed to be the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, but I’ve read that one, and however thin the paper is there is no way the book can be that thin 🙂
Games, 2020-09-09
A puzzle from the Heye Elixir-series, my first, I think. I’m not usually a fan of the gothic-type images (also, they look really difficult), but somehow, I loved this one. It wasn’t easy, but there was enough variaton in the background colour so that it wasn’t too bad, either.
Duck Collection Complete!
Great news! I finally managed to find the last of the Kaj Stenvall duck puzzles. I first decided to try and collect the entire series in early 2019, and by July 2019 I already had 29 of the 30 puzzles that I’m aware of, and I’ve been looking for the last one ever since. When someone had a glued and framed copy for sale, I even considered getting that and taking it apart, but I’m really too lazy for something like that. The most frustrating moment came in October last year, when there was one for sale on a Finnish site (tori.fi), but I was in Dortmund, the seller offered pickup only (no shipping), and it was located 200 km from Helsinki in a place where I didn’t know anyone. Since I couldn’t possibly ask someone to drive 400 km in the middle of a pandemic for a puzzle, I just cursed silently to myself and wondered if I would ever find that last puzzle.
And then, on Monday, there was again a copy available, and it wasn’t even for sale, but given away. I was lucky I saw the posting almost immediately, and managed to get in first. It was, again, 200 km away, and I would have happily driven, but the previous owner very generously offered to send it if I paid for the postage. Which I was very happy to do, of course, in fact I was so happy that I paid a bit extra. Today I finally got my hands on this:
You can see all of the puzzles in the series on my dedicated page. Now I just have to do them all 🙂
Coto de Doñana, 2020-09-05
Coto de Doñana is a national park in the south of Spain. This was, once again, a puzzle that turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. For some reason I started with the greenish strips in the middle, and that probably wasn’t the wisest move. The precision of the cut isn’t all that good with newer Tactic puzzles, and somehow that felt especially problematic with this puzzle. I ended up spending almost a week on this, when I would have expected 2-3 days.
Antique Library, 2020-08-30
This puzzle is part of a new Educa series called Enigmatic, and it’s pretty obvious the series has been inspired by the Ravensburger Exit/Escape-series. I got this thinking there would be some mystery to work out, but these are just regular puzzles. I don’t mind, it was a nice puzzle 🙂
Skyscrapers in New York, 2020-09-01
When I started on this one, I was expecting it to be one of those “WTF was I thinking” puzzles (I have a lot of those), but it actually turned out to be quite easy. I still can’t work out why. The sky and buildings are fine, of course, but that’s less than half of the image. The poles in the foreground (no idea what these things are for) also came together quite easily, to my surprise. One thing that helped was that image wasn’t quite as dark as on the box.
I was watching Kojak while working on this so I had the perfect backdrop 🙂
Alice in Wonderland: Inspecting the Tarts, 2020-07-20
I would love to do more Alice in Wonderland-themed puzzles, but there aren’t that many, and even fewer with the original (or original style) illustrations that I prefer. I just had to get this, even though I rarely buy new puzzles with less than 500 pieces.
This had 300 enormous pieces, the puzzle is almost as big as a normal 1000 piece puzzle. The fit was a bit too tight for my taste, but it was still very enjoyable.
Göta Canal, Sweden, 2020-08-19
Another vintage Ravensburger from the 80’s. I was afraid there was going to be too much of the dark areas and vegetation for me, but I ended up enjoying it. As always with vintage Ravensburger. Apart from the missing piece this was in great shape, like new, really.
Göta Canal, Sweden, Ravensburger, 1000 pieces. Completed on August 19, 2020.
Puzzler1909 