Cobble Hill has a series of 500-piece puzzles with horoscope signs, and I’ve been wanting to try one for a while now. The pieces are really big, and the finished puzzle is the same size as a 1000 piece puzzle. It was my first 500-piece Cobble Hill, and the quality is as good as with the 1000 piece puzzles. I had always considered 500-piece Cobble Hill puzzles a bit pricey for the piece count, but I didn’t realize that they have XL pieces – I may have to get a few more of these.
An image with (English-language) women writers and quotations from their works (I presume). Unfortunately, you can’t make out the text at all in the photo.
This turned out to be more difficult than I was expecting, but it still remained entertaining to the end. I love painted cakes in a puzzle image, somehow they’re even more satisfying than photographic images of actual cakes.
While I would happily eat everything in this image, I would probably start with this:
Chocolate and raspberries 😋
For the puzzle challenge, this is No. 6, delicacy.
Colourful frog collage of frogs. The frogs I know from Finland are all the same dark green colour, but these certainly made for a more entertaining puzzle.
This turned out to be really enjoyable, proving that it really was just that I was in the wrong mood when doing Pink. There were enough slightly larger objects, and the text also helped to keep it interesting, but not too challenging.
For the puzzle challenge this will be #19, yellow.
This puzzle had been hovering near my cart for a few years, somehow always ending up not making the cut, until a couple of months ago when I finally bought it. And I’m glad I did, because it’s now sold out (I think I got the last copy), and I very much enjoyed doing it. I especially like the colours. I did the yellow pile of coins first, then the rest of the background, and the red bits of the dragon were last.
For the puzzle challenge I’m doing, this was the bonus challenge for January, which is “dragon”. By the way, the literal meaning of the Finnish word for dragon is “salmon snake” – a rather desperate attempt to describe a dragon using some familiar animals.
CORRECTION: Actually, it seems that the first part probably doesn’t mean salmon here, but it comes from an old Swedish word “floghdraki”, which means flying snake. The Finnish word “lohikäärme” took the first part (flying, flogh) from the Swedish word and used the Finnish word for snake (käärme). A flying snake makes much more sense.
This was another puzzle in the series “What was I thinking?”. Somehow, I only realized that this will probably be quite hard when I pulled it out to do it, all that white and brown. I’m not sure if these are real, or if there’s been some photoshopping involved, but they look amazing. I especially like the skyline (not sure of what city).
Obviously, I did the background and cups first:
The rest was a lot slower, but I found in entertaining anyway.
This was my first puzzle in the Cobble Hill Rainbow Collection, and I have to say it was not as enjoyable as I was hoping it would be. Turns out, I wasn’t in the mood for a puzzle with such small details, I think I would have preferred some larger objects. There was also a small quality issue with many pieces stuck together to another piece, and in many cases it wasn’t possible to separate the pieces without damaging them.
I really liked the clock and the water melon:
The word pink appeared in many languages, including Finnish (“vaaleanpunainen”):
Another Star Trek puzzle by Cobble Hill, this time with posters for episodes from The Next Generation-series. I preferred the designs for The Orignal Series, but this was great fun, as well. Again, I have definitely seen every episode of TNG more than once, but I still can’t recall most of the episodes here from the poster and title alone. The most familiar ones are I, Borg, where Captain Picard was turned into a Borg, and Deja Q, featuring a really childish and annoying creature with enormous powers.
Here are some close-ups of designs that I liked:
For my puzzle challenge, this is #20, a person or character you would like to meet. The character is Captain Picard, but not when he was a Borg!
Another one of the Cobble Hill Star Trek puzzles. This one features stylish posters for The Original Series episodes. I wonder, what these images were created for. Probably not for this puzzle, but individual episodes of TV series don’t usually have their own posters. Perhaps Star Trek is a special case 🙂
I’ve definitely seen all of these episodes, probably more than once, but I still can’t remember what all of them were about. I remember Mirror Mirror very well, that was an episode where some people ended up in a parallel universe, where the Enterprise crew was evil, and some of the evil crew ended up in the normal Enterprise. Evil Spock is the one with the beard, obviously. I also remember The Trouble With Tribbles, a more comic episode, where the tribbles were small furballs that reproduced at an alarming rate.
Anyway, the puzzle was great fun!
A while ago, I wasn’t sure if there were four or five puzzles in this Cobble Hill series. Turns out, all I had to do to find out was turn the box upside down:
There are five, of which I currently have four. The last one that I don’t have has photos from TOS. I prefer the stylish posters from the other puzzles, but if I come across the last one, I will probably get it anyway.
Puzzler1909 