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.
Skyscrapers in New York, Tactic, 1000 pieces. Completed on September 1, 2020.
I was watching Kojak while working on this so I had the perfect backdrop 🙂
Early next week, I will be returning to Helsinki with a ferry from Travemünde (a borough of Lübeck), and I found this puzzle that shows that the route has been popular for a long time 🙂
All of the city names are in Swedish or German (which is why it says Helsingfors instead of Helsinki, and Reval instead of Tallinn), and the text is in German. The puzzle is part of a Tactic series called Come to Finland, featuring old travel adverts for Finland.
Lübeck-Helsinki, Tactic, 1000 pieces. Completed on September 19, 2020.
I looked up some of the ships mentioned to try and date the poster, and it seems that the ships mentioned, Linnea and Storfursten (“The Grand Duke”), were both on this route from 1892 until the first world war. Interesting, and also lots of fun as a puzzle.
Today is Kalevala Day or the day of Finnish culture. It’s not a holiday, unfortunately, just a flag day 🙂 The Kalevala is a national epic, put together in the 19th Century from ancient oral traditions. The puzzle shows a scene from the Kalevala, where a witch (the one with wings) is trying to get the Sampo, a magical object that brings wealth and good fortune. The man with the white hair is Väinämöinen, a central character in Finnish mythology.
The Defense of the Sampo by Akseli Gallen-Kallella, Tactic, 1200 pieces. Completed on February 11th, 2020.
As a result of this fight, the Sampo was lost forever.
The painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallella, from 1896, is very well-known in Finland.
I bought the puzzle second hand, but it was still sealed. I’m missing two edge pieces on the right, and while I usually blame myself, I find it a bit suspicious that I would have lost two contiguous pieces from the edges. Also, I noticed early on that those two pieces were missing because I did the edges early (not first, I started with the yellow and green sky).
I finally managed to finish this, but I almost gave up. There were 200+ pieces of the background where the image was no help, and unfortunately pieces would also fit where they didn’t belong. It happened several times that I had tried all remaining pieces for a spot, only to find that the only one that would fit was a piece I had already placed elsewhere, and the piece looked fine in the original spot, too. I recently talked with a puzzler who told me she enjoys this, as an extra challenge, but I must say I hate it! Tactic has been a bit hit and miss, and this was probably the worst I’ve done so far.
Life is Sweet, Tactic, 1000 pieces. Completed on September 22nd, 2019.
Next up a Tactic puzzle with text and milkshakes 🙂
The woman on the box is a Californian who lives (lived?) in Finland. There were also pictures of two other puzzles in the series on the back of the box, one with cupcakes and one with popcorn.
There’s a recipe for a strawberry-cheesecake milkshake in Finnish, and I did the text first, of course.
Collecting all of the puzzles in the Kaj Stenvall Collection is progressing well. I know of 30 puzzles, and I think that’s all there is, but I’m not certain. Anyway, I already have 27, so I’m (probably) only missing three!
I was especially happy to find a copy of one of the two 500-piece puzzles (I already had the other one). I was beginning to doubt whether it existed because I couldn’t even find a photo of it. Anyway, it does exist and I found it, factory sealed:
The Social Structures in the Harbour of Love
I made a page with a list of all the puzzles because I could have used one, but I didn’t find anything like that.
Tactic had a series with album covers of Finnish bands, where you get a 300 piece puzzle and the album as a CD. The series has been discontinued, but you can still find them second hand. Most of the covers don’t make great puzzles (so much black), but this was interesting.
The band, Sielun Veljet (Soul Brothers, although “soul” doesn’t refer to a type of music in Finnish, and their music was definitely not soul), is one of my all-time favourites and one of the most successful Finnish bands ever. Most of their stuff is in Finnish, but this album has English lyrics. You can probably guess that their music is quite strange from the title: Softwood Music Under Slow Pillars. They were impossible to put into any one genre, and the word “shamanistic” was often used when someone tried to describe them. They were also a brilliant live act!
Softwood Music Under Slow Pillars by Sielun Veljet, Tactic, 300 pieces. Completed on May 28th, 2019.
The edges, as well as top and bottom, were really easy, the rest took a while, but it was only 300 pieces, after all.
The box contains the puzzle and a CD.
On the back of the box is this brilliant image that I used to have on my wall in the 80’s. I was so happy to see it again!
I’m in Dortmund again, and I managed to finish the latest duck-puzzle. The white/grey areas were all right, but the wall was pretty difficult, especially the last 200 pieces. Having only the basic piece shape with no variety made it worse, but fortunately, the colour is not completely uniform, and you could also see the texture of the painting.
The Spirit and the Material of the Bottle by Kaj Stenvall, Tactic, 1000 pieces. Completed on May 12th, 2019.
I checked my other puzzles in the series, and of the ones I have, there’s only one more of the “only two tabs opposite” type, and that’s not as difficult as this one. There are a couple with a lot of white, though …
I’m back in Helsinki, but before I left Dortmund I started on another duck puzzle.
I’m doing the more difficult ones first on purpose. Unfortunately, this has both large monochrome areas and just one type of pieces (basic shape with two tabs opposite). The puzzle was factory sealed (I’m not surprised), and there were quite a few pieces not properly separated. I usually don’t like that, but in this case, I’m not complaining…
There was also quite a lot of puzzle dust.
So much for the easy part: the top of the table cloth and the window in the upper right-hand corner.
Puzzler1909 