This was a great puzzle! It would have been nice as just a collage with wine labels, which is what I thought it was, but when I started doing it, I noticed that some parts of the labels continued onto neighbouring labels. I’m not sure if these are actual wine labels that have been edited, or if they are entirely imaginary, but either way, they made for a wonderful puzzle.
A giraffe taking a bite out of a balloon and my favourite label, the Argentinian Malbec.
A Gibsons collage with toys and games. This continues the recent trend where 1000-piece Gibsons are excellent quality, and 500-piece ones are pretty bad. They must use different subcontractors. This was similar to the Jumbo Wasgij-puzzles, it has the same waxy finish, and a similar cut. It also says Made in the Netherlands on the box, so it may not be entirely accidental. (There was no indication of where the previous substandard 500-piece puzzle was made, I checked.)
Anyway, the puzzle was great fun, even though there were few of my favourite toys in there.
Here’s one that I have fond memories of:
Basically a big, air-filled ball that you could hop around on, holding on to the “ears”. Mine was orange, and I don’t think it had a face painted on.
Football and games. None of the board games are familiar to me.
I’ve only done three MasterPieces puzzles before, and those were all much better quality than this one. Unfortunately, the fit wasn’t very good. It was mushy, not as bad as Sunsout at its worst, but the same kind of bad fit. This was a very recent acquisition, and I noticed that the price was lower than for the previous MasterPieces puzzles I bought. I would rather have the better quality and the higher price.
So, I started out a bit grumpy because of the bad cut, but I have to say this image was so much fun that I still enjoyed myself enormously. I especially liked all the signs on the wall 🙂
On an unrelated note, I found the lost piece from Monaco Classics. It was in the fridge. Yes, in the fridge. I think I know how it happened: there was a box of clementintes in the fridge, and I took it out for a while and put it down on the table where the puzzle was. When I put the box back in, there must have been a piece stuck to the bottom.
My second Unidragon puzzle. This one I ordered directly from the Unidragon website, despite the fact that they had quite a few bad reviews. What people were mostly complaining about was that they were slow to ship puzzles, but I don’t mind that, I can wait. Except I didn’t have to, because this beauty was delivered very fast, and as promised dispatched from within the EU (which means no import duties or taxes).
This was so much fun, with lots of whimsies and an interesting cut. This time I even remembered to assemble the puzzle on a piece of cardboard, so that I could easily flip it using another piece of cardboard:
I decided not to pull out the whimsies, there are so many of them. There are a lot of stars, and not just as whimsies, many connectors are also star-shaped.
Here are two versions of Saturn:
There’s also the sun:
There are also a lot of round objects, but I can’t tell what planets they represent, only Saturn is easily recognizable.
I like the way all the round objects are formed in different ways, concentric circles, three solid pieces, two spirals and so on.
All in alla great puzzle!
Quite busy racing scene, a bit difficult in the beginning, but it got easier fast. I love Loup’s funny, big-nosed characters. Unfortunately, I managed to lose a piece.
A very busy pit stop.
A note to (now retired) German race car driver Michael Schumacher from his wife Corinna (it’s actually spelled with a double n) :-). While this 1500-piece version is from 2019, the image was originally released as a 2000-piece puzzle in 1997, when Schumi was still very much active.
UPDATE 26.1.2022: I found the missing piece. It was in the fridge…
I think this was my first Heye for this year. I’m sure there will be many more 🙂 While it’s not quite as busy as many Heye images, it was kind of difficult to know where to start. I ended up doing the sharks first (I’m pretty sure they’re sharks, although they behave more like dolphins, and there are way less teeth than in most portrayals of shark). After I got going, the puzzle was great fun!
This was a very enjoyable puzzle, and also my first Re-marks. I got it in a swap with Stacey at MyJigsawJournal, so thank you, Stacey! Almost all of the things in this collage are things I remember, although much wasn’t really to my taste. When I think of 80s movies, I think more along the lines of Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, not Footloose and Flashdance 🙂
I found the quality to be good, but not excellent, and it was certainly the best puzzle with a ribbon cut that I’ve ever done. I actually realized that my dislike of the ribbon cut is more to do with the fact that all of the ones I’ve done before have been rather poor quality than with the cut itself.
Here’s one show that I definitely watched:
The Golden Girls. The last of them, Betty White, passed away just before new year. I now know that she had a long career in American television before that, but the Golden Girls was the first I saw of her. What none of the obituaries that I read mentioned was her amazing portrayal of Catherine Piper in The Practice and Boston Legal – she was brillant, and so funny. RIP Betty White.
When I saw this piece, I immediately thought that Planet of Apes was much earlier than the 80s:
It would be impossible to do puzzles without interpreting the individual pieces, but it can certainly lead you astray when you don’t have the complete picture 🙂
I did another Wasgij. This is part of the series where the finished puzzle shows what happens next. I have to say they do a good job of keeping the level of difficulty just right in this series 🙂 As usual, you can click here to see the finished puzzle.
Ass is a German producer of playing cards, and in the 80s, they also made puzzles. Ass means ace in German. I remember liking the brand in my youth, and I’ve wanted to one again, but there aren’t that many around anymore. This puzzle is from 1984, and I still liked the quality and the cut. That said, Ravensburger from the same time is even better.
I tried to find out what happened to Ass Puzzles, but Google was unhelpful. I did find out that there’s a brand (?) of puzzles called Asshole Jigsaw Puzzles, so I guess that’s something. There was an entry about Ass on German Wikipedia, but there was no mention of jigsaw puzzle production.
By the way, the ship in the puzzle also has a Wikipedia entry. It was built in Hamburg in 1909, and has had Polish owners since 1930. It is now a museum ship.
I have a particular fondness for 500 piece Clementonis, and this was fantastic. I did it from the top down, starting with the sky and working myself down. The quality was, of course, great, and although I bought this used, it was in perfect condition.
Puzzler1909 