Turns out, Castorland also uses the same dies for 500 piece puzzles, but in this case, the puzzles fit on each other so that the other image needs to be upside down. That was something I hadn’t considered. The two jigsaws I used were Sunset Harbour and The Stony Bridge.
Sunshade and a bottle of wine landing in the garden.Cottage landing in the harbour.
These work a bit better than the previous ones, but nothing spectacular yet. The puzzle mashup artist, Tim Klein, did say that he preferred older puzzles because new ones are so busy and full of detail. I think he’s right, this mashup thing would probably work better with less stuff in the images, to begin with. I kind of like the sunshade landing in the garden, though.
You’d think I would be able to tell which puzzles will be easy and which will be hard by this time, but I am so bad at it. I thought this was going to be easy!
Cactus Family (Lovely Times Series) by Gabila, Heye, 1000 pieces. Completed on December 8th, 2018.It started out fine, first the bottom, then on to the cacti (cactuses?).But then came the wallpaper…
Eventually, I sorted the remaining pieces. On the puzzle are all pieces with some pink flower, on top the ones with just a tiny hint of pink. To the right, on top the pieces with just orange lines, then the ones with some green and at the bottom the green dots at the points where the orange lines intersect. This way I was able to fill in the remaining parts reasonably fast (with heavy use of the image on the box). Usually, I sort by shape at the end, but here this worked better.
Enjoyable, if more challenging than expected.
I put it away in sections, hope to be able to use it in a mashup later.I snapped this picture at the Dortmund Christmas market. I think it would make a great puzzle 🙂
Cakes & Pies by Wayne Thiebaud, Pomegranate,1000 pieces. Completed on December 6th, 2018.
Excellent quality. The pieces are really thick and great variety in shapes – the traditional “two pegs opposite” pieces are in a minority here. The texture is also especially nice. I tend to run my hands over puzzles while working on them, and this one feels really nice 🙂
When I spread out the pieces I was a little worried that it would be really difficult, and while it wasn’t the easiest puzzle I’ve ever completed it wasn’t that hard either. In the end, there were fewer white pieces of the same shade than I expected.
From here on I had to rely on shape alone – not a problem in this case.
Somehow the level of difficulty remained the same during the entire puzzle, which is unusual.
I looked up the artist, Wayne Thiebaud, and it turns out he is 98 years old! He was a kind of forerunner to the pop art movement, although he did not consider himself a pop artist and he disliked Andy Warhol’s style. He often painted pastries and cakes. I would love to do more puzzles with his paintings.
Another easy one. I probably wouldn’t have gotten this a couple of years ago, but recently I have started to enjoy this type of “idyllic cottage” theme in puzzles.
The Stony Bridge by Dominic Davison, Castorland, 500 pieces. Completed on December 5th, 2018.
Castorland is a Polish manufacturer. The pieces are much thinner than Ravensburger or Heye, but not so thin that it’s a problem. The fit is excellent, and pieces only fit where they belong. Considering that their puzzles are much cheaper than the premium brands, I think they are excellent value.
After the pigs, I wanted something quick and easy.
The Christmas Library by Aimee Stewart, Ravensburger, 1000 pieces. Completed on December 4th, 2018.
This was one of those puzzles that get harder towards the end – the last 100-200 pieces were the most difficult to place. All in all, it was, of course, really quick and easy.
I have to say hardly any of these books are familiar to me, the only one I know I’ve read is A Christmas Carol (by Charles Dickens, although the name of the author isn’t visible on the cover). Some familiar authors, of course, like H.G. Wells and the Grimm brothers.
My favourite cover, The Case of the Blue Carbuncle.The Snow Queen.The Wonderful Christmas Tree.
The Pig in Art by Ryba, Heye, 4000 pieces. Completed on December 4th, 2018.
I’ve been in Dortmund since Thursday and finally managed to complete this one.
I finished the sky and water early but didn’t really have a plan, as usual. I just kept adding pieces here and there.The border took ages.
I’m not a great art historian, but here are some details of featured works:
Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. I have a puzzle of this painting 🙂Poor van Gogh has lost his ear.Mona Lisa by da Vinci.The Water Lily Pond by Monet. This painting is also available as a puzzle, but it looks too difficult for me.Botticelli’s Venus, with lots of small Venuses instead of one big one.I have no idea who this mediaeval king is, but he’s just been handed a large invoice.
I found two puzzles with the same cut! They are Tactic 500-piece puzzles, Waterhouse and Palm Beach. Makes sense that smaller manufacturers would use the same dies for all puzzles with the same piece count, whereas large manufacturers have different dies and even the same images can be differently cut. As I suspected, the mashup results were hardly spectacular, but I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for possible combinations.
Added some beach and palms to cheer the duck up.Phantom duck in the palms.Moving the sections around.
That was fun! Hope to find some more striking combinations next time.
Logos, Tactic, 500 pieces. Completed on November 28th, 2018.
Encouraged by my flea market purchases I got a couple of new Tactic puzzles. Unfortunately, the quality is not the same in the newer puzzles. The pieces are much thinner, although not so thin that it’s a problem. It reminds me of Castorland. More annoying was that pieces don’t align exactly:
The left-hand piece is “shorter”.
This was, of course, a really easy puzzle, so I don’t know how this would work out in a more challenging puzzle. It seems that the quality has gone from excellent to passable 😦 Some of the edge pieces weren’t properly separated, but I pulled them apart.
Kaj Stenvall Collection: Waterhouse (1993), Tactic, 500 pieces. Completed on November 26th, 2018.
This went really fast, only at the end with all the black pieces left did I slow down a bit. Since it’s a painting the texture of the canvas and brushstrokes helped with the lighter sections. Anyway, really good quality took me about two hours to complete.
The painting is by Finnish artist Kaj Stenvall, but if it looks familiar, it may be because of Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott:
John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888. Inspired by Tennyson’s poem. Also available as a puzzle!
In 1989 Stenvall published his first paintings with familiar-looking ducks in surprising situations. He’s still painting new duck paintings. Some, but not all, are versions of famous paintings.
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Stenvall’s version.
Whistler’s Mother and Sky Channel by Stenvall.
The paintings are really popular, and many are available as posters. Tactic also released some of them as puzzles. The puzzle series has been discontinued, but it is not rare to find them at flea markets in Finland.
If you’re interested, you can find more of Stenvall’s work here. It’s not all ducks, in fact, the recent ones are mostly Trump and Putin 🙂
And if you should happen to come across a Tactic puzzle, the quality is great! (UPDATE: The new Tactic puzzles are not as good and have much thinner pieces.)
Puzzler1909 