Last night I sorted the open section of the 18,000 piece 4 Historical World Maps and started assembling it. I sorted into gold pieces, gold edge pieces, water pieces (favoring continents), continents and black edge and flowers with maze and blue border, and man drawn objects.
It took roughly 5 hours to sort (about the same amount of time it took M to book her "free" flight home with Spirit Airlines... worst airline ever) and I started assembling the "border". By border I mean the gold pieces with a picture on them. It turns out this is going to be a seriously difficult puzzle. The pieces do not interlock well. Ravensburgers new puzzles fit much much better. The pieces appear to interchange readily and have little translation variation (all knobs seem to fit in the middle of each peace). All of this combined with the image quality and subject matter made fitting pieces with a pattern on it difficult and frankly, this puzzle is damn near impossible. Hats off to the patient few who have suffered and completed it!
Well here is the border and all the little gold soliders lined up (roughly 436 of them pure gold) which makes for just over 1200 of these little guys in the whole puzzle... Well if you think that is hard, you should see the bag with all the little dots that is the ocean.... I think we will be here for a while. I know I was "going" to start another section of double retrospect, but until we get the leak in our roof over the puzzle table fixed, I am not risking damaging that one!
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| All that gliters IS gold! |
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| Putting the board on an incline make working with a large puzzle a LOT easier! |
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| All lined up and ready to puzzle! |
Wow! You guys certainly do like a challenge don't you? LOL I love the map on this puzzle, but would never try just due to the gold border. It looks horribly complicated. This one is going to take you forever....when are you going to be able to start Life?
ReplyDeleteCongrats on that purchase too btw!! What a good deal you got.
We are going to do a section of this one, then a section of another big one etc! We also just won the 9000 piece Tower of Babel (found it on the german ebay, if you really want an out of print large format puzzle, THAT is the place to look for them!) and currently bidding on my "Holy Grail", Paolo Veronese's The Wedding Feast at Cana (9000 Ravensburger). So given we have 2x18000, 1x24000, 1x32000, 1x8000, and 2x9000, we have plenty of puzzle to do (thats 26 4500ish piece sections to do)
DeleteSo with all of that said, maybe we will start on the section of life you are on, and then come back and do the one you already did, we are really fast and have addicted our neighbor too, so I am sure we can catch up. M is really excited for life, its will be far more interesting than world maps!
Holy Cow that's a lot of puzzles to do!!! The Holy Grail one...is that the one that you've been trying so hard to find? I hope you guys get it.
DeleteI would love to see you guys start on Life when you get it. That would be cool. You will TOTALLY blow me away in a few days as I don't get much time to work on it with a 3-year old running around and another one on the way in August! LOL But it will be fun to compare progress and pictures of the section ( 2 is the one i'm working on now).
Glad to hear M is excited about the Life puzzle too. It really is a lot of fun to work on....there's just so many different elements to it that it's easy to just say, "Today I'm going to work on the moon, or the lighthouse, etc.) Easy to sort the pieces since there's such diversity in the picture.
Let me know when you start it!
Penny
Yes, it is the one I search for on the internet EVERY SINGLE DAY! The one currently on ebay has already been assembled and disassembled so it would be doing a for real 9000 piece puzzle (I would never subject myself to that on purpose, but maybe its a fitting conclusion to this chapter). This is the puzzle that started it all for me. I assembled the left half and almost completed the right when I moved years ago and the puzzle got destroyed in a move and I never finished it. But it IS the puzzle that started this craziness so I would really like to complete it.
Deletehttp://sexdrugsandjigsawpuzzles.blogspot.com/p/puzzle-list.html#weddingfeastatcana
Hey there...did you win the bid on the puzzle you've been wanting? I hope so. If not, how much longer until you find out if you've won?
ReplyDeleteThat would be so cool from a symbolic standpoint to be able to get it and complete it.
How do you guys find so much time to puzzle? I struggle getting in 45 minutes on mine more than 1 to 2 days a week usually. LOL
I guess you guys will find that out too if you start having kids at some point. How long have you guys been married? Did you hook M on doing puzzles or did she like doing them before you guys even met?
Penny