This wonderful Kandinsky painting from 1936 makes a great puzzle. It also happens to be one of the best quality Grafika puzzles I’ve ever done, and the end result was one of of my favourite puzzles ever. And this is the second Kandinsky on that list (The first was Balancement). I’m not sure what makes these so appealing to me, but I love them, and find them almost impossible to leave until the last piece is in place.
I’m back in Helsinki, but after this, I still have two other puzzles that I finished in Dortmund before leaving. I’ve been enjoying puzzling so much that I’ve taken no time to post about them. The artist, Edward Gorey, did a lot of book covers, but I don’t know where this illustration was used. It’s called Untitled (or, perhaps it’s just untitled), and from 1965, according to the box.
I thought this might be difficult, but even though the colours are a bit muted, it was fairly easy to pick out the pieces for each dress and coat, because the patterns are all different. Very enjoyable and I love the image. Reminds me of illustrations in a series of horror story books that I loved as a child (that wasn’t Gorey, though, it was Swiss-Swedish artist Hans Arnold).
I wanted to try a wooden puzzle, so I got this beautiful puzzle from Unidragon, which turned out to be a Russian brand. It was pretty difficult for 291 pieces, but very enjoyable.
There were some strange things in the box, like a piece of sack cloth around the pieces (not a bag, just a piece of cloth), and that had shed some fibers among the puzzle pieces. Then there was this:
Extra pieces for the branch? I have no idea what to do with these. Except, now, as I’m writing this, it occurs to me, I could probably put each parrot on their own branch with this, so that the five images aren’t connected. Some pieces of the branch were interchangeable, so that I had to try a few times before I got it all together.
The only wooden puzzles I’ve done before this are vintage puzzles, and one Artifact puzzle. The Artifact pieces were definitely thicker, and larger, but I would say the cut here is just as good. I’ve done so few wooden puzzles, I feel I can’t confidently say much about the quality.
The next wooden puzzle I do, I will be doing on a piece of cardboard, because flipping this was a pain:
There were lots of whimsies, and many, many birds:
The two composites were especially nice.
The rest were mostly flowers and fruit, with a couple of animals:
There was also a whimsy of the dragon logo of Unidragon, and one that I can’t work out. Is it a fish? I originally thought that the dragon was a rabbit, I interpreted the dragon wings as bunny ears 🙂 It was only when I noticed it was the logo of Unidragon that I realized it was actually a dragon.
Next I decided to do a puzzle that I couldn’t possibly finish in one sitting – and I didn’t. That said, it wasn’t as bad as I expected, at first glance I thought it was just a lot of people, but there as some easier bits as well. One piece missing.
Looks like the artist himself is present and selling his puzzles:
This turned out to be another all-nighter 🙂 I don’t think I’ve ever done a 1500 puzzle in one sitting before, but it happened with this one. I just took a short pause when I needed to eat. The colours actually look brighter than on this photo, but this was the best I could do ( I tried both artificial and natural light).
This was my third Bluebird Puzzle. The brand is French, but the puzzles are manufactured in Turkey and Poland. I have a bunch of 1000-piece puzzles, all made in Poland. I’ve only done one of those, but that had regular grid cut pieces, while the two others I’ve done (1500 and 3000 pieces) have had very small pieces. This finished puzzle is the size of a 1000-piece puzzle. Here’s a piece from a Schmidt puzzle on the left and one from this one on the right:
I don’t mind the small pieces, although I would appreciate a heads up on the box – now you have to look at the piece count and the size and do the math. Anyway, the quality is nice (both for the Polish and Turkish puzzles), the price is low and there are many nice images, so I’m happy 🙂
This puzzle was so much fun! I started on Friday after work, and then stayed up the entire night because I just couldn’t stop.
As an extra challenge, there are 15 objects present in the puzzle that are missing from the box image, although inside the box there’s a complete image with the missing objects circled. This was the kind of image where I only glanced at the box a couple of times anyway, it was quite easy. Schmidt has done the same thing with several Steve Read images, and you’re supposed to find all the missing object after you’re done. I did spot some of them, but couldn’t be bothered to find them all.
The quality was fantastic, as is usual with Schmidt.
I’m back in Dortmund for two weeks, but before I left, I finished this puzzle:
A lot of buttons in this one 🙂 About half was reasonably easy, but after that I relied on the box quite a lot. There were lots of fun details, but I think these female rocker figures were my favourites:
Close to the top there’s a small window, and you can see that the studio is mostly under ground:
Perhaps one pair of boots belongs to the owner of the studio, his place inside seems to be occupied by a dog.
When I bought this, my thought process was something on the lines of “Ooh, pretty!”, but when I pulled it out to do it, I actually did think that this could be quite difficult, so for once, I wasn’t entirely unprepared. I did the edges early, because I wasn’t sure how to proceed, and after that I spent some time just staring at the pieces. Eventually, it started to make sense, and it was a very enjoyable puzzle, although it took a bit longer than I expected.
The date on the bag was in April 2021, and the pieces were definitely thinner than any Cobble Hill puzzles that I’ve done so far. The cut itself was crisp, and much better than the rather mushy cut in the puzzle of Mars that I did recently.
I couldn’t really pick out any favourites of the tiles, they were all beautiful, but here are some close-ups:
I finished it! It took about a month, and I think most of that time was spent on the last 1500 pieces 🙂 Even so, it never got boring, and there was enough variation even in the dark parts. I loved every minute of this! When I finished, I had two missing pieces, but I managed to find both of them after crawling around the floor for a bit.
When looking up information about the Eye of God, I found out that it’s just a name that’s sometimes used for the Helix Nebula – meaning that the Helix Nebula actually appears twice in the puzzle. It does look quite a lot like an eye.
I’m back in Helsinki, but I actually managed to finish another puzzle in Dortmund. Surprise, surprise, it has a space theme 🙂
There were quite a few pieces that weren’t properly separated, and more puzzle dust than I prefer, but otherwise, this was great fun. I did the text first, and that was easy, as was the small maps showing landing sites to the right of the text.
With the map itself, I went entirely by colour – unlike with maps of Earth, the place names were no help at all 🙂 Since there was so much text, it was still pretty easy, but in a larger piece count this could become very difficult.
Mars is the planet that most resembles Earth, and it used to resemble Earth a whole lot more. The atmosphere was thicker, and there were seas on the surface. This, of course, raises the question, if Earth is heading in the same direction…
Yesterday, I completed my other space themed puzzle, so that will be my next post!
Puzzler1909 