There are two puzzles in the Kaj Stenvall collection that are mostly white, and this is the easier one of those two. I pulled the edge pieces, and I’ll start with that. Usually I save the edges for when I’m unsure what to do next (or for the very end if there’s a border), but that point came really early with this one. Wish me luck, and don’t expect to hear from me for a while!
Back to the Kaj Stenvall puzzles. I only noticed that there are two ducks in the bed when I started on the puzzle – the smaller one has no pillow, so I expect the bigger duck is the lord.
The puzzle is one of the better quality Tactics, and there was enough variations in colour to make it reasonably easy. I bought it second hand, and it has clearly been assembled a few times, there was a bit of lift, but I was happy to find all pieces present.
Another duck puzzle from the Kaj Stenvall collection. This is actually one of my favourite images in the series, and it also turned out to be a very entertaining puzzle. The quality was good, although some of the pieces were a bit worn. I could definitely tell that the puzzles has been completed a couple of times before. I was actually happy to find it complete, the box was badly scratched and there were some crayon markings as well, but I guess the child didn’t get into the box, because the pieces were not damaged, and also all there.
More ducks by Kaj Stenvall, this time sleeping in a boat. The fit was much tighter than the previous puzzle, but although this was factory sealed, many pieces had some lift, and the overall feel was not good. You really never know what you get with Tactic.
Another Kaj Stenvall collection puzzle. This one was fairly easy, and the quality was otherwise OK, but the fit was very loose. I didn’t really mind, I really enjoyed this!
Remember ths Kai Stenvall Collection? I just realized that it’s been an entire year since I found the last puzzle in the collection and completed it. I’m going to start doing more of these, otherwise I’ll never get them all done. Two cranky ducks this time, looks like some sort of marital dispute.
This was thankfully one of the older, better quality Tactics, otherwise those sheets would have been impossible. It looks so clear now, but most of the blue pieces looked more like grey before I put it all together. Not easy, but it remained enjoyable to the end.
Viivi and Wagner is a Finnish comic strip by Jussi Tuomola. It features a couple consisting of a woman called Viivi, and a pig called Wagner. Wagner is a pig in more ways than one. The first strips came out in 1992, and it’s still ongoing.
The puzzle is one of the better Tactics, the newer ones are unfortunately of lesser quality (and often ribbon cut). The older ones are grid cut, with a good mix of piece shapes and sturdy pieces. The quality here reminded me of Piatnik. The green background took a while, but it wasn’t too bad.
By the way, I found the lost piece from my previous puzzle, the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. It was in the laundry and was lucky it didn’t end up in the washing machine. I think it’s the first time a find a piece in the laundry.
A puzzle from my now complete Kaj Stenvall-collection. All of these puzzles have titles in English and Finnish, and often they are very strange, especially the English translations. This title contains the Finnish word “kolmio” that can mean either “triangle” or “three-room flat”. Doesn’t quite work in English 🙂
Anyway, the puzzle was really excellent quality for Tactic (sadly, the newer puzzles are much worse), and that was a good thing, because with a less precise cut this would have been really difficult. As it was, I really enjoyed it.
The duck is just twiddling his thumbs, I guess, but to me it looks like he’s looking at a non-existent smart phone 🙂 The painting is from 2006, and while mobile phones were widespread, I think they were still mostly just phones with no internet access, and you wouldn’t sit and look at it the way we all do now.
Coto de Doñana is a national park in the south of Spain. This was, once again, a puzzle that turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. For some reason I started with the greenish strips in the middle, and that probably wasn’t the wisest move. The precision of the cut isn’t all that good with newer Tactic puzzles, and somehow that felt especially problematic with this puzzle. I ended up spending almost a week on this, when I would have expected 2-3 days.
When I started on this one, I was expecting it to be one of those “WTF was I thinking” puzzles (I have a lot of those), but it actually turned out to be quite easy. I still can’t work out why. The sky and buildings are fine, of course, but that’s less than half of the image. The poles in the foreground (no idea what these things are for) also came together quite easily, to my surprise. One thing that helped was that image wasn’t quite as dark as on the box.
I was watching Kojak while working on this so I had the perfect backdrop 🙂
Puzzler1909 