WANTED: Wedding Feast at Cana (9000pcs by Ravensburger)

The first large puzzle I ever attempted was The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese and printed By Ravensburger in a 9000 piece format! I lost it in a move and it has long since gone out of print! If you have this puzzle for sale or come across it, please please please, let me know!

This puzzle is impressive but nowhere near as impressive as the real thing! Take a look at the real thing in the Louvre http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/wedding-feast-cana

Can you believe this painting was stolen by Napoleon? I guess if I was Napoleon I would have wanted it too!

The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese is an immense work. Commissioned in 1553 it hung in the  refectory of the Benedictine monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore before it was stolen by Napoleon's troops and sent back to Paris.

This puzzle comes in many size, but I am looking for the 9000 piece version from Ravensburger. If Educa/Ravensburger/Celmentoni want to seriously trump the other in the arms race for the largest jigsaw puzzle, I have a modest proposal; a life size replica of this work! This would be a completed puzzle 22ft high by 32.6 feet long and approximately 228,000 pieces (Given that most 9000 piece puzzles are approximately 4.5ft X 6.3ft completed means they have a piece density of 318 pieces per square foot)!

This would be equivalent to assembling just over 7 Double Retrospects! Given that retail cost is 300 for  Double Retrospect, it would be at least 2100 dollars for the puzzle... I will start saving my pennies! Better yet, does anyone have access to a good set of puzzle dies? Let create this thing!

228,000 piece life size version. Lets do it!

Props to some OG Puzzlers

Seems the Slater family is one serious puzzling family! Thanks for the tips on glueing and tracing like sections!

They were the first to assemble the 24,000 piece life puzzle, and have assembled more large format puzzles than anyone surely has. They have some great information and techniques on their sites:

This is all about how they assembled LIFE: http://www.aegroup.com/puzzle/


I have talked about how Double Retrospect repeats and I use a previously assembled section to complete the next, well this technique is going to save me a LOT of time!

Great technique from Scott Slater on how to use another section to help complete a new section. Large puzzles have repeating sections of the puzzle. In double retrospect, there are only roughly 1000 unique pieces, they are repeated and rotated in each image.

Here is there video on mounting a large puzzle

Happy Sisters

Now that is a couple of happy sisters!

M and her sis finished Sour Gummies

Running

Today we ran 1.5 miles and bought a bunch of new puzzles to keep us busy and stock up after our puzzle threesome blasted through 3 in a day!

Sissy comes to puzzle

M and her sis are finishing up Sour Gummies tonight and I am starting on the 1500pc purple sunset tree. The tree reminds us of our Joshua tree on highway 1!

Puzzle Threesome

Oh yeah! Puzzle Three-way! Now that is naughty!

Every man dreams of bringing a girl home to play with this wife. Well, tonight we did just that. Our friend Mary came over for a three way puzzle session. M worked on her doggie puzzle. Mary tackled the Sour Gummies and I took on the Lighthouse. I jammed through the lighthouse in about 4 hours (125 pieces an hour!) M finished her doggie puzzle and Mary, well she sure did look pretty.... :-)

Big daddy needed to feed his little girls so I made Baked Bacon Chicken (BBC... but not that BBC), rice and veggies. The chicken was so fucking good. God I love chicken!

Oh yeah, in other news, M and I started training for a marathon this December on our 1 year anniversary! We are on a 38 week training schedule and this should be interesting. Its time to shed some pounds and rack up so miles when we aren't puzzling!

BAAAAAACOOOOOON! CHICKEN. Boom!

M CANT FIND THE PIECE!

Fuck your pan! OMG this was good!

Goodwill has yet to let me down. It was touch in go for a minute. There is nothing I hate worse than  a missing puzzle piece! I was convinced a rock piece was missing. It turned out to be confused with an upside down sky piece! It sure was a lot of entertainment for $1.00 (total assembly time 4 hours)

M finally finished her boxer puppy puzzle. AWWWWWW. They are so cute!

Sour Gummies

All packed up

I am kinda sad. This is the first time since January that double retrospect has not been on the table or in progress. I ended up breaking section A into 16 even parts and making a box to hold the assembled sections securely and then packed them in the original box.

It's funny to me how much energy it took to covert the bag of pieces into that neat stack. Entropy is going to fight all that energy I put into it. I must do my best to protect it!

It took nearly 80 hours to convert that bag of pieces into a nice neat stack of sections.

Failed attempt to store the pieces in the bottom of the box. I realized I just needed to break it down further and store all the sections in one neat stack (above). 

First section of double retrospect done!

We finished the first of 8 sections today! Total time for assembly is about 80 hours as predicted. The next section should be about 70 hours now that we have one set to use as a guide for assembly. The trick to this puzzle is to use the repeating pattern of shapes. Each individual artwork is roughly 1000 pieces and in this photo the top left we will calle A-1, top right is A-2, bottom left is A-3 and finally A-4. The way the puzzle is cut, A-1 is the master, A-2 is a duplicate of A-1 and A-3 and A-4 are orientated upside down of A-1. This is a bit confusing, but the point is, there is really only 1 roughly 1000 piece die used to make the puzzle so you can use this bit of info to make your life a lot easier!

We wont start the next sections until we get to St Thomas! I figured I would leave this assembled for overnight before I pack it up for shipping!

-Cheers

Section "A" completed

1 down, 7 to go!

Yellow complete!!!

Making good progress on Double Retrospect. I finished yellow today and that leaves just red to complete the first section!

Life (24000) pcs

I found someone just about as crazy as puzzles as us. They actually completed Life as a 24,000 piece puzzle (combine all four 6,000 piece sections and solved it at once). Not only that, they did it for a good cause. Good on you!

Check her out!
www.everypiececounts.com

4 Ancient World Maps 18000pcs

I finally found a puzzle I have been looking for every day on craigslist for 3 months! I found it for 35 bucks on craigslist! 1 of the 4 bags has been opened, hopefully its not missing pieces as the missing piece program is finished for this puzzle. It went our of print in 2009.

4 Historical World Maps - 18000pc, Ravensburger (Out of Print)

Now this is a puzzle

So, we have wondered if we could find a puzzle that was sexual in nature and well, I think I have found our next puzzle titled Anal Kiss!

Go figure, no one in the US has this puzzle and its only available from the museum store. But hey, this is one unique jigsaw puzzle.

The artists is the Belgien Wim Delvoye (http://www.wimdelvoye.be/analkisses.php) and yup, this is what you think it is. He made a series of prints by placing lipstick on a rectum and "kissing" a piece of paper!

If you are as into anal sex and jigsaw puzzles as we are, maybe you might want to do this too. You can buy it here!

http://store.perrotin.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=anal+kiss&x=-1171&y=-119

OMG BACON and Beatles

I just found the most amazing puzzle ever!

Bacon - 1000pc by Aquarius
14.99 at http://www.puzzlesforsale.com/bacon.html

YUMMY

Also by Aquarius, Abbey Road at 1000pc.

M starts the doggy puzzle

M started working on the doggie puzzle at 11:30pm Friday night. I started working on yellow in double retrospect earlier this afternoon.

Cathedral Game

Its not a puzzle technically, but it certainly has some puzzle characteristics. M was very happy to beat me today!

The idea of the game is to place all of your pieces on the board. Each player takes turns placing their pieces. If you manage to wall of a section of the board, that becomes your territory and your opponent cant place a piece there. If you manage to enclose exactly 1 other building of your opponent (or the neutral cathedral) then it is removed. Play starts with someone placing the cathedral anywhere on the board.

Three small rule details; 

1. You cannot claim space on your first turn 
2. In order for building to connected, they have to touch adjacent squares (in other words, if two buildings are touching diagonally, they are not connected
3. You cannot use the cathedral to form part of a wall that encloses space.

Mercedes was very happy to kick my ass. As you can see, she has placed all of her pieces and I have 3 buildings left!

Changes

Mercedes finished image A-2! Way to go wife! I will be home in a week to help with the other two before we move!