Britto Mug!

Our Britto mugs were broken in shipping years ago. Today at the thrift shop, I found a replacement for 3 bucks!  Love building the Britto puzzle while drinking from my Britto mug.

Britto Mug in its proper place, on the puzzle table!

Green and Grey Done

Making solid progress! Here are some progress shots

Green and Grey completed

The only way to build big puzzles, organization by color and then by shape. If  you can't break the work into a set of pieces that can fit on one of these boards, your life is very hard!

Without organization... life is hard!

Yellow done, starting white

I finished up yellow last night and starting on white today. There appear to be close to 800 white pieces by quick estimation!

Lets get started!

Hello Birdy

The usual shape sorting. I'm impressed with the quality of these pieces!

Sometimes, everything happens for a reason.

So Mercedes and I got in a big fight last night. The stresses of island life; moving away from our friends and family, learning to communicate together, making new friends, heat, bugs, lack of services on island, our transportation situation  and not having AC in our house is making life difficult and fights more inevitable. 

So M decided to leave, to cool off and I decided to do soothing constructive. I don't like to puzzle when I am mad, because puzzling to me is something I do when I am happy and something M and I do together. Well, I made in exception last night. We have a puzzle that was crushed in a box during the move and it lost a few pieces. We decided to put it together and cut out a W for our last name in the completed puzzle (Hopefully hiding the missing piece) and put it on our front door.

So I started on the 750 piece puzzle by Julian Askins titled Lake Side View. I started as usual, sorting the edges and flipping pieces. Shortly after starting on the edges, a piece stuck to my arm and fell in a flowerpot under the table. I just barely caught the flash of white out of the corner of my eye, it might have otherwise gone unnoticed and unlooked for as the puzzle we know is missing pieces.

 The pot contains a dead stalk of a plant that we inherited when we moved in and is pining for the seeds we recently bought. I retrieved the piece, and I thought, "huh, thats a funny place for a piece to land". I also noticed there was a bit of a whole where a piece could fall in and end up under the dead plant. I picked up the plant just on the hope that our missing piece from the James Rizzi 5000 piece puzzle we just finished might be in there (I mean it seemed reasonable that if a piece from this puzzle could fall in there, why not from Rizzi?) and to my disbelief the piece sat starring back at me, freed from its dank tomb. 

I never really wanted to do this puzzle. The thought of spending hours on a puzzle only knowing you will be disappointed does not rank high on my list of things to do, but I needed to cool down and do something constructive and the end result of this was that we found our missing piece which started the healing process of our fight. I guess without the fight, we may have never found the piece, and the piece helped end our fight. 

Its seems appropriate that a puzzle brought us back together.

The missing piece

Happy Birthday Mercedes, The Glass of Wine, New Tattoos

Today is Mercedes birthday and to celebrate, we are getting new matching tattoos. Of what you ask? Well, a puzzle piece of course! But wait, it's not just any puzzle piece, its going to be our favorite piece from the James Rizzi Nothing is as pretty as a Rizzi City puzzle! Pretty kick ass huh!

In other news, after about 50,000 pieces, I had my first puzzle accident last night... I spilled a glass of wine and ruined about 25 pieces of the 5000 piece Rizzi puzzle we are getting tattooed today! I was so mad at myself, I know better than to have beverages on the puzzle table. M just said, thank god it was not me! I guess we are going to test the Ravensburger lost/broken piece replacement program.... so sad!

In other news, Mercedes mom bought her a puzzle for her bday! Its so colorful and we cant wait to show this one off!

We are getting this as matching Tattoos for M's 29th Birthday!!! It's a piece from James Rizzi's Nothing is as Pretty as a Rizzi City 5000pc puzzle by Ravensburger

Mercedes Mom got her Color Palette 1000pc from the Master Pieces Colorize series for her bday!

Rizzi's Progress

Sky Complete!!

Rizzi progress

We made a lot of progress tonight!!

The Sky and buildings are coming along nicely

M's banging out the people on the street

Various Cars and Parts

Rizzi ready to puzzle!

After about 5 total hours,we are sorted flipped and have the edge assembled. This is so far my favorite puzzle. It just makes me happy to look at all the colors and happy images.

Thats is what 5000 unassembled pieces looks like

A better view, we have sorted in priority edges, anything  pink, then blue, then contains sidewalk (white), contains street (brown) and then everything else. 

The fully assembled border! Good thing we have such a large table!

Assembling the border

James Rizzi: "Nothing is as pretty as a Rizzi City" Ravensburger 5000pc

Last night we started "Nothing is as pretty as a Rizzi City" by James Rizzi. It is the largest single puzzle (5000pcs) we have started. We are working on larger ones, but then all break down into smaller puzzles (4000ish pieces). James Rizzi was an american pop artists known for his 3d cityscapes and happy objects.

Here are some links: 
Official Site: http://www.james-rizzi.com/en/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rizzi

More artwork: The World will be watching, On The Boardwalk, Mountains of Fun, Birds in a Junk Yard, The best art is a good heart, Take the A Train to Harlem, From New York to Heidelberg, Kohle gegen Kohle, In the Heart of the City, Bon Voyage

James Rizzi: Oct 5 1950 - Dec 26 2011. 

James Rizzi: Nothing is as pretty as a Rizzi City - 5000pc, Ravensburger 

http://www.seriouspuzzles.com/i12868.asp

Mercedes started sorting the 5000 pieces on our new puzzle table.

Rizzi Happy Houses in Germany (Wikipedia)