Very enjoyable, as usual! Not the easiest mystery puzzle I’ve ever done, there were so many small faces in this 🙂 Also, I wouldn’t like do a Jumbo with large areas of the same colour, then I would be uncertain if a piece belongs or not, but with these busy images, it’s fine.
I won’t show the finished puzzle here, but if you want to see it, you can find click here. Loved the angry girl 🙂
An extra post today, outside my normal schedule of Tuesday & Friday.
When I set up my spoiler page for the Exit / Escape series, I decided to leave the puzzles within the puzzle to Ravensburger, since they do provide hints. Even though Ravensburger provides hints and answers, I’ve gotten quite a lot of messages from people who want to know exactly how you are supposed to get to the correct answer. Most questions were about the Observatory and some about the Witches Kitchen, and I used to answer them privately. For these two puzzles I’ve now added explanations of the puzzles within the puzzle, and I also split the single spoiler page so that there is one page for joint issues, and then every puzzle also has its own spoiler page. The single-page was getting too long and difficult to manage, in fact, I found that I had inadvertently copy-pasted in some German text about football. Oops 🙂 The spoiler page for the Witches Kitchen is here and the one for the Observatory is here. I also went back and put in links to the individual spoiler pages for all the puzzles in the series where I had posted about them.
I redid both of these puzzles for this little project:
They are so much fun, and also, my photos weren’t good enough to work out all the details I needed for the puzzles. Actually, I think I’m going to continue redoing this series. These two are the ones that get the most traffic on my blog, and the next two are Vampire Castle and Dragon Laboratory. I think they’re up next 🙂 With at least two puzzles (The Temple Grounds and The Curse of the Wolves) I will try to work from photos if I decide to try to explain the puzzles – they were quite difficult.
It also looks like Ravensburger is getting ready to release some new puzzles in the series, Their help page already has entries for three new puzzles: Unicorn, Green House and Toy Factory. The Toy factory looks especially nice, but I’m getting them all as soon as they are available 🙂
A puzzle with Gelinis, gummy bear characters from Germany (the German title is Gelinis on a Treasure Hunt). Germans love gummy bears, small bear-shaped candies. I’ve seen puzzles of up to 5000 pieces with Gelinis, but this is the first I’ve done. It was very entertaining, and also quite easy.
With the puzzle, there were also fake gems that you can glue on the puzzle (glue was also included). Didn’t do that, obviously 🙂
And here’s a cartoon version of the painting from last week! Author and artist Mauri Kunnas has made an illustrated version for children of the Finnish national epic Kaleva, called The Kalevala of Dogs. All the characters are dogs, although here the bad guys look more like wolves, I think.
The witch definitely looks like a wolf in a wig, reminds me of Little Red Riding Hood 🙂
I love the little self portrait with the signature.
There’s also a more warlike version of the self portrait, my favourite detail in the image 🙂
The quality wasn’t great, as usual with Peliko, but I loved the image!
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.
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).
Happy Kalevala Day!
Not my usual type of image, or piece count. I recently bought about 40 puzzles from someone who wanted to get rid of all her puzzles at once, and it worked out at less than 2 EUR / puzzle. All good brands, including about 10 Wasgijs and even a wooden Wentworth puzzle. This and the Wentworth were the only ones in the lot with less than 500 pieces. There were also four puzzles in there that I either have or have done previously, but I don’t mind.
This has XXL pieces and was pleasant enough to put together 🙂
My friend brought the other puzzle made by her grandfather’s brother! The Christmassy one I wrote about earlier has only recently been re-discovered, but this one my friend remembers doing multiple times as a child. As you might expect, this is more worn, and on one piece the image is partly gone. Not a huge surprise for a puzzle that many children have worked on.
The image shows scenes with Native Americans doing the things white people expect them to do (there’s one white guy in the upper left-hand corner), and I doubt this image would be made today.
A shark, a dog, a duck and a tree with a woodpecker and an owl. Really impressive!
These are the only known puzzles by this artist, but I’m sure he did more, and I hope they will be found someday!
This was a fun and easy puzzle. Trafalgar Square with Nelson’s column and the National Gallery in the background. Another quick one.
And Happy Valentine’s Day! I got this 77-piece puzzle as a freebie with an order. This happens quite a lot in Germany, when you buy for a set sum, you get something for free. I think it’s a way of getting rid of stock they can’t move, and usually what you get is useless, but this was nice. It’s a Schmidt puzzle and excellent quality.
I bought this used and carelessly threw it on the backseat of my car. Of course, it slid off, and I had to pick up the pieces from the floor. When I had finished the puzzle, there was still one piece missing, so I headed back to my car in the middle of the night, and managed to find the missing piece 🙂 Happy end!
I enjoyed this a lot, I like doing water (also rocks, but not forests). At first, I wondered why everyone on the boat is wearing blue, but then I realized they must be raincoats.
I bought this for the princely sum of 1.50 EUR, and it turned out to be complete! It’s a Ravensburger from 1980, and the quality is fantastic. The piece shapes are so distinct, I often connected pieces based on shape alone. It makes me kind of sad that quality has declined so much in the past 40 years. In fact, I decided that whenever I see a Ravensburger from before 1990 at a good price I’m buying it, whatever the image. Most of the time, I find cut and fit more important than the image.
Some of the pieces and the box showed definite signs of wear, it looks like this puzzle has been assembled many times.
There was actually a reason I decided to do this puzzle. I saw the Ravensburger 9000-piece Bombardment of Algiers for sale for a very good price, factory sealed, and I wanted to try a classic maritime image to see how I liked it. I did end up buying the 9000-piece puzzle:
The box has been opened, but the bags are still sealed!
Puzzler1909 