I did a Wasgij, and as usual, you can find the image of the finished puzzle by clicking here.
Wasgij: Cone-gestion, 2022-01-03
Category: Helsinki
Movers & Shakers, 2022-01-02
This was a great image, and the quality was not as bad as my last 500 piece Gibsons. It’s ribbon cut, which I don’t like, for some reason, and the fit wasn’t great (but OK).
I’ve done some really lovely 1000 piece Gibsons in between (they were grid cut and great in every way), but I wasn’t happy with The Missing Piece. Even so, turns out I was lucky, because I saw someone post about the same puzzle on FB, and they had entire rows of pieces missing, and doubles of other pieces.
Anyway, mediocre quality, but it was still pretty fun to put together!
Road Trip, 2022-01-01
This was a great puzzle to start off 2022, with a really nice image, and some text as well. This is another 1500 piece Bluebird, and again, I find the quality astoundingly good for the price. The puzzle was manufactured in Turkey, and has smaller pieces than usual, so that the finished puzzle is the size of a regular 1000 piece puzzle. The fit is excellent, quite tight, but not so tight it’s difficult to take apart. All in all a wonderful puzzle.
While I’m not planning any trips to Florida, I do hope that travel will become easier in 2022, so this puzzle is a fitting start in that respect as well 🙂
Beer Coasters, 2021-12-28
This collage was just as entertaining as it looks, and I loved every minute of it. While there are many beers that I recognize, such as Heineken, Sol, Foster’s and Guiness, the really big German brands are missing (no Paulaner, Warsteiner, Bitburger, Erdinger, or Beck, for example. There are some German beers in there, but the only one I really know is Kölsch. Oh well, it was still a very entertaining assembly!
Three Owls, 2021-05-24
Well, this one slipped through the cracks! I did this back in May, apparently, but forgot to blog about it. I did, however, make a note in my database, which is how I know exactly when I completed it. Sadly, I can barely remember it, but it looks nice. Except for the tree, that was probably a bit difficult.
Who Said That?, 2021-12-25
I usually spend the days before Christmas cooking and baking, and in between I like to place a few pieces, of course. This time I had something a little bit different, courtesy of Stacey at My Jigsaw Journal. A puzzle, where half the pieces have a picture of a person, and the other half a quote, and your task is to connect the quotes to the person who said it. The pieces will fit more or less anywhere, but there are some small hints (photo from instructions on the box):
It was really difficult, and I had to refer to the poster quite a lot, but it was also great fun, and somehow especially well suited to Christmas. There were quite I few people I had never heard of, and lots of very familiar quotes that I had no idea who had said them 🙂
I won’t post a photo of the finished puzzle, although I’m not sure it would count as a spoiler, since you definitely wouldn’t be able to make out the text (which, for my poor old eyes, could definitely have been bigger). It was “only” 504 pieces, but the finished puzzle was as big as a 1500 or a 2000 piece regular puzzle
Thank you Stacey, this was a lot of fun and perfect for Christmas!
Our World, 2021-12-22
A world map that’s been sitting in my to-do pile since 2007. The quality was good (it’s a Schmidt, they are even better now). Putting together the continents was fairly easy, I’ve done so many maps that I’ve become pretty good at it. The water is always more difficult, and this was true even though they had done a good job of marking a lot of currents and small islands, so that there were virtually no pieces with just water and nothing else. The dark blue border was also harder than I expected.
Relax on Kepler-16b, 2021-12-18
I’ve actually done this image once before, it was part of a Cobble Hill collage with posters for (imaginary) space travel. Kepler-16b is a planet in another solar system, one with two suns, and it’s 200 light years from earth, so I don’t think anyone will be visiting anytime soon 🙂
Especially the white part was a bit more difficult than I would have expected, but still very enjoyable. The pieces were larger than usual, so that the puzzle was almost the size of a regular 1000-piece puzzle.
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it! I won’t be doing any Christmas puzzles this year.
Cambridge Rooftops, 2021-12-17
My first Wentworth. I’ve had this for almost two years, and I got it for next to nothing in a lot with many other puzzles. Nice, but more difficult than I would have expected for a 250 piece puzzle.
Some of these, I don’t know what they are, but the frog is my favourite 🙂
Since Brexit, we have to pay import duties on puzzles ordered from Wentworth, but they reimburse us for those costs, so I may have to place an order in the near future…
Harbourside, 2021-12-16
This was my first Otter House puzzle, and there were many things I liked about it. The image, of course, and the pieces had a really nice finish, and there was a good mix of piece shapes.
I also liked the packaging, the box was no larger than it needed to be, and there was no plastic anywhere, the pieces were in a paper bag.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good. The precision of the cut was bad, and pieces would fit where they didn’t belong. With this image, it was always possible to see if a piece belongs or not, but when I place a piece into a corner formed by two other pieces, I don’t want to have to get a magnifying glass to know whether it’s correct or not. There were also two extra pieces, which means someone else is missing two pieces. I really wanted to like this. It’s frustrating when they do so many things right, but fail at the most important thing. I’m not saying I’ll never get another Otter House, but the image will have to be pretty spectacular, and definitely no large areas of the same colour.
Puzzler1909 