A collage with paintings by 19th Century English painter Thomas Chambers. He was born (and died) in England, but he spent most of his life in the USA. He did mostly maritime subjects, as you can see from this collage.

The paintings where a location is specified are all from the US Northwest, except one painting of Gibraltar (middle of the top row). (I’m assuming this is British Gibraltar in the south of Spain, although I did find a Gibraltar to the south of Detroit, at lake Erie.)

This was a very entertaining puzzle. I did the text first, then water and sky, and as usual, the vegetation was the most difficult part, and I did that last. The top left painting, “Storm Tossed Frigate”, was the most fun to do.

Packet Ship Passing Castle Williams, New York Harbor. Castle Williams still exists (I checked), but I bet everything else looks different now 🙂

Lovely view of Niagara Falls.

After a slightly disappointing puzzle, I chose one that is pretty much disappointment proof. Lots of text, food, and silly word games. I loved it!

It seems almost impossible to choose a favourite, but that stack of pancakes with “I regret nothing” really resonates with me 🙂

I was actually going to save this puzzle for later, but when I heard that the excellent Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura in the original Star Trek series and many films, sadly died on July 30, I thought it was time to do this.

The puzzle was fun and relatively easy. Many of the characters were very familiar to me, although some I can not recall at all, and others I know, but I don’t remember in which series they belong 🙂 I probably know The Next Generation best of the series, although I have seen them all, except for the last one.

Star Trek really was ahead of its time in many ways. Before the original series started in the 60s, they did a pilot, where the second in command was a woman, but test audiences reacted badly to a woman issuing orders (“who does she think she is?”). Majel Barrett, who played the character, later appeared as various characters, including Nurse Chapel in TOS, and Lwaxana Troi in TNG, both present in the puzzle. She also married series creator Gene Roddenberry.

In the 60s, Uhura was a rare example of a black woman appearing as a competent professional in an American TV series. Later, NASA employed Nichelle Nichols to attract women and African Americans to join the service.

Fun puzzle with some great ladies!

I’m in Dortmund again, and will remain here for the next six weeks. Puzzling will be intermittent, I’m planning a trip to the south next week.

I’ve seen paintings by Canadian artist Franklin Carmichael as puzzles, but always decided they were too difficult. Well, a collage makes things a lot easier, and this was a lovely puzzle. Love the colours!

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!

Great Sherlock Holmes themed collage by Cobble Hill. At the bottom there’s a timeline of stories, and there are short presentations of major characters, famous quotes and scences from the stories. The most difficult part was the squiggly Sherlock Holmes text in the middle – I did that last.

Possibly one of the the greatest puzzles I’ve ever done. A 2000-piece Cobble Hill collage of posters promoting (non-existent) space travel. I actually have the Kepler 16b-poster as a separate, 500-piece puzzle, but that’s by the New York Puzzle Company, this is by Cobble Hill.

By the way, the box says “Random Cut”, but as you can see, the cut is actually quite tame, and looks almost like a ribbon cut to me.

The quality was overall great, but there was a bit of a “fault line” in the middle of the puzzle, and that doesn’t work too well with text (or lines). It really didn’t look good:

I still think it’s one of the best and most entertaining puzzles I’ve ever done. Stylish posters and lots of text 🙂