This was a nice enough rural scene type puzzle, in fact it’s #3 in the Rural Crafts series. I’m not usually a fan of vegetation in puzzles, and I could have done without the trees here 🙂
There is actually something strange in the way the farrier is working:
This door collage was just as fun as it looks! Even though the title is Doors of the World, all the doors look somehow English to me 🙂
Some of the pieces have probably absorbed some liquid at some point, but there was no discoloration (or smell), you could only tell because the fit was far too tight in some places.
I forgot to take closeups, but since there is no black and yellow door, of these, I would choose the pink door (third row, third from the right).
This, unfortunately, turned out to be probably the worst Ravensburger that I’ve ever done. Many of the pieces won’t lie flat, and the fit was also quite loose. I don’t mind a loose fit, but combined with a bad cut it doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience.
The puzzle is from 2004. I bought it second hand, but the bag with the pieces was still unopened.
Until I started working on it, I thought there would be hardly any text in this puzzle. Well, turned out that there were plenty of place names, you just needed a magnifying glass to see them:
I can’t think why they would have made the text so small. All in all, not a good day for Ravensburger.
This was a fun collage full of stuff associated with London (in many cases with England). I started with the quotes (“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” – Samuel Johnson and “A bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else” – Unknown), then I pulled the red pieces.
The crown, Sherlock Holmes, and “Mind the Gap” (the gap between train and platform on the Tube).
It was raining in almost all the images 🙂
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.
An Aimee Stewart puzzle inspired by Jules Verne (there are several of his books present in the image). I thought it might be a bit too dark, but it was not a problem, and the puzzle was overall a bit easier than I had expected.
I would love to travel on this train:
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.
All of the planets are now more or less complete, only some darker bits of Saturn and Venus are still missing. Even better, the planets are all connected to each other! Only some nebulae and spacecraft are still floating around on their own. There are no more celestial bodies or man-made contraptions left to do, now it’s all just filling in the areas in between. When I look at the puzzle, I think I’m almost done, but then I look at all the pieces I still have left, and there’s at least 1500 pieces there. This happens to me with every large puzzle, at some point I think that the pieces I have left can’t possibly all fit in to the puzzle 🙂
I’m still loving this puzzle. The sun is finished, and Saturn is well on its way. I think I’ll do Jupiter next. Although the three biggest celestial bodies are all yellow, the sun pieces were easy to pick out, and mostly, I can also tell the difference between pieces of Saturn and pieces of Jupiter. Jupiter is next, I think.
In Roman mythology, Saturnus is the father of Jupiter. The Greek equivalent is Kronos, father of Zeus, and the planet was already known as Saturnus in ancient Rome. Somehow I never realized before that the habit of naming planets by Graeco-Roman deities actually goes back to ancient Greece. In China, the planets were named by elements, for example Mercury is the star of water, Mars the star of fire and Jupiter the star of wood. More about Chinese planet names.
Quite a lot of progress on many fronts. Of the planets, I’ve worked on Neptune, Venus, Mercury, and Earth. Many of the nebulae and the man-made stuff have also grown a bit.
Earth, Moon and Mercury.
Mercury is named after the Roman god Mercurius (Greek Hermes, god of commerce and messenger of the gods), and it is of course the smallest planet in our solar system. It was actually called Hermes by ancient Greek scientists, and later Mercurius by the Romans, because they noticed how fast the planet moves. Because the orbit of Mercury is more elliptical than that of any other planet, it is at some points very close to the sun, and at others very far from the sun, causing the temperature to vary wildly from -173C / -280F to 427C / 800F. It takes Mercury 88 days to orbit the sun.
There is currently a mission to gather more information about Mercury underway. The spacecraft was launched in 2018, and it did its first flyby of Mercury on October 1, 2021.
Still some work left on Venus:
The Dumbell Nebula and the Cassini spacecraft:
The Dumbell nebula represents the last stage of evolution of a star and is a glowing shell of ionized gas. In time, it’s expected that the sun will also become such a nebula.
The Cassini spacecraft was used in a mission to gather information about Saturn. It was launched in 1997, and after being active for almost 20 years, it was intentionally destroyed in 2017. The mission was a huge success and provided material for years of research.
The International Space Station was launched in 1998. It is in orbit around earth, and there are 7 crew members on board. Each crew member usually stays for about 6 months.
Puzzler1909 