A collage of Victorian scraps. This took longer than expected, mainly because I was doing other things 🙂 The image was not easy, but the quality is fantastic. I did the edges first, and even though there’s a lot of pale pink pieces with nothing else on them if a piece fit, it belonged. The same was true for the entire puzzle. This puzzle was released in 2006, and it makes me sad how much quality has declined since then.
Bought in thrift store, but complete.
A collage of vintage aircraft ads. It occurred to me that aircraft ads are a bit strange. Airline ads I understand, but the customers of aircraft producers are surely airline execs, not the general public. You can, of course, try to make a type of aircraft so popular that airlines will want to buy it to satisfy customer demand, but it seems kind of a long shot.
The Groke is a rather complex Moomin character. On the one hand, she is threatening and scary, but she also represents loneliness. Everything she touches freezes. She longs for contact with others and warmth but is unable to form relationships. She doesn’t speak.
Here she is seen gliding through the forest, and you can see the ice forming around her.
The wreck is just the start of the story, though. In 1961, after years of careful planning, the wreck was brought up from the bottom of the sea. The shore was lined with school children who had been given the day off to be able to watch the old ship rise again after over 300 years. It is now in a purpose-built museum, and if you are ever in Stockholm, you should go and see it. It’s a spectacular exhibit and very well presented. I’ve seen the ship twice, the first time as a child when it was still in the temporary location known as the Vasa Shipyard, and again about five years ago in the new museum.
Anyway, back to the puzzle. It’s a Peliko puzzle, bad quality as usual, and with one edge piece missing and one extra piece. Oh well. I also get more and more annoyed that they don’t bother to name their puzzles. The artist is Mauri Kunnas, a prolific children’s book author.
What you might call a very traditional puzzle. Drottningholm Palace in Stockholm is the private residence of the Swedish royal family. It was, of course, easy to pick out the pieces for sky, water, boat, palace and vegetation.
I think there is more variation in piece shape in the newer Schmidt puzzles, this must have had about 80% two-pegs-opposite-type pieces.
I bought this used, and the pieces were in two bags. I thought it was going to be really easy at first, but then I found three corner pieces in the first bag 🙂 I think the puzzle is from the late 90s, it says 02 99 one of the bags, and it could be the one where the pieces originally were.
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My post from yesterday somehow got backdated to December, but I fixed it now.
My expectations were very low, but this was still worse than I expected. Very thin pieces and all pieces the same shape, that was no surprise, but the image looks pixelated in some places and blurry in others. As if a picture that was too small was blown up to make the puzzle.
Obviously, the pieces would also fit pretty much anywhere, but that was only a problem with some of the edge pieces on the horizontal borders. I’m pretty sure it’s not put together exactly right, but whatever.
Shame really, vintage Coke commercials look great. I don’t know why the Coca Cola Company would licence something like this when there are excellent brands out there to work with.
The puzzle was factory sealed, and I mean SEALED. There was no way to open the box, I eventually cut around the bottom to get it open. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
So, I finally managed to finish a puzzle. Fresh content!
This was a triptych in the form of three separate 500-piece puzzles, each with an image of a lighthouse in a raging sea. I usually prefer a bit more colour, but I especially enjoyed doing the water. The images are, of course stunning, the photographers are Philip and Guillame Plisson. No idea where these lighthouses are located, though.
A so-called panorama puzzle, measuring 98×38 cm instead of the usual 70×50 cm (for 1000 piece puzzles).
The Brenner Pass is located on the border between Austria and Italy, and it is one of the most important connections between southern and northern Europe. It is a well-known route to crossing the Alps since prehistoric times, and the Romans used it; now there’s a 4-lane motorway.
I liked the panorama format, I can reach all parts of the puzzle easily without stretching. This was a fairly easy puzzle, only the alps and the rocks in the foreground were a little slow. I really enjoyed it!
I brought in a third puzzle to the mashup, Cactus family from the Lovely Times series. I did that earlier but put it away in sections. The orientation of this puzzle is landscape, whereas the other two are portraits.
This doesn’t really mesh, the contrast is too big somehow.
Eyes on the cactus work a bit better.
The cactus puzzle didn’t actually fit perfectly into the other puzzles, you had to push hard in some places.
When I was putting away the puzzles I put the Forest Cathedral in the Hi Monsta! box by mistake, but I left it as is. All that means I now have pictures of Zozoville puzzles on the bottom of the Forest Cathedral box and Inner Mystic pictures on the bottom of the Hi Monsta! box. Oh well.
I tried putting the puzzles away in sections, but some of them broke up. Heye has a fit that is not exactly loose, but lifting large sections is difficult.
I put the eyes on top – I doubt you’ve seen the last of them 🙂
The Inner Mystic and Zozoville puzzles turned out to have the same cut, which of course means mashup time 🙂 This may be really obvious, but the fastest way to check if a puzzle has the same cut is when you’ve completed the first puzzle is to find a corner piece from the other and try it out (bearing in mind it can also be upside down). It may not be 100%, but if the corner doesn’t fit, you can definitely put the first puzzle away.
This was again a case where the puzzles where one puzzle was upside down in relation to the other, going by the cut.
It would have looked better having those eyes on top, looking down on the scene, but not too bad. Except now I feel I should probably apologize to Andy Kehoe for ruining his beautiful picture 🙂
The troll is thinking about the forest.
I have to admit, when I bought the Zozoville puzzle I was thinking how great those enormous eyes might look in mashups. You can expect to see them everywhere I can fit them in 🙂
Puzzler1909 