Look what I found!

Good morning!
Its been well, forever since I have puzzled or updated you guys. Sorry about that. Well this morning during my daily ebay search. I found a new big boy! (My wife thinks I a a shopoholic....) anyhow. Its a 6000 piece puzzle from Bits and Pieces. I didn't even know they made them!

Its colorful and fun, what do you think? (Guessing Penny thinks its ugly!)

Window Wonderland - 6000pc, Bits and Pieces

Glacier and the Tower

NEW PUZZLE DAY! I love new puzzle days! Today the first 6000 piece Schmidt big boy showed up! It's a photograph of a glacier! This big bad boy is gonna be hard! The pieces are a great shape with skewed standard shapes and a wide range of scallops!

A few days ago, Gabor Szittya's Tower of Babel 6000pcs by Nathan arrived from San Diego! It's a great interpretation of the original work by Bruegel (we also own the 9000pc version of that one). The pieces have a very large lengthwise bias! I love the image of this one and look forward to it very much!

Hope all is well on your end! Anybody puzzling out there?

-Thomas

Glacier - 6000pc Schmidt
Purchased from ebay for $1.00 on 8/1/2013

Glacier pieces close up. Now that is a landscape for you!

Tower of Babel - 6000pc, Nathan
Purchased from private owner in San Diego 8-1-2013

Tower of Babel close up, the pieces have a strong lengthwise bias!

New Puzzle Day!

The collection is getting out of hand!

We have been slowing down on the puzzle purchasing, but there are just a few more that have shown up recently! Here they are including the first over 10,000 piece puzzle!

I am really glad the Neuschwanstein Castle is in great shape! This is really an important puzzle as it Ravensburger crushed the competition with this puzzle and remained the undisputed champion of the large puzzle scene for nearly 20 years! The bags of pieces are unopened and I unless I have some sort of change of heart, they will be assembled one bag at a time, there is  a LOT of scenery in this puzzle!

We have never done a 3D puzzle so we figured we would start with the worlds largest one! I guess we were inspired after watching the animation of it being put together!

I look forward to the Clementoni puzzles, they seem to be very well done!

Neuschwanstein Castle - 12,000pc, Ravensburger
Purchased from ebay for $275 on 7/28/2013

New York 3D - 3,141pc, Wrebbit
Purchased from ebay for $76 on 7/16/2013

Dolomites - 6,000pc, Clementoni
Purchased from ebay for $20 on 7/14/2013

Zodiac - 6,000pc Clementoni
Purchased from ebay for $53 on 7/9/2013

Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 16

Slow but Steady progress!

I finally got a few hours at the table today. I managed to hunt for and place about 20 red pieces and decided to orphan them and move onto orange. After organizing by shape, I was able to place somewhere around 80 pieces for about 100 piece day... It is painfully slow going for me, I prefer piece counts much nearer 500 but lately the time has been short. Anyhow, here is todays progress.

In other news, we have a new Puzzle Building Service project! We are building the 6000pc Creation of Man by Clementoni for someone in Hong Kong! Customs has the puzzle here in St. Thomas so it wont be long! We look forward to working on this one a lot! It's fantastic that the puzzle came all the way from the other side of the world for us to build it for someone! We could not be happier! What's even more awesome? We have been paid in advance with the 18,000pc - At the Waterhole puzzle for our efforts!

We are certainly going to be busy!

- Tom and Mercedes!

We offer a puzzle building service and are building this one for our friend in Hong Kong! It is the 6000pc Creation of Man by Clementoni.

Our newest puzzle to the collection, Ravensburgers 18,000pc At the Waterhole by David Penfound.

Life: Day 17

Well its been two weeks and change already. I had hoped we would be done with the first section by now but we have been busy with work and birthdays and puzzle tables and blogs and facebook integrations etc etc etc... Yeah Yeah excuses...

Last night I finished up the lower third of the puzzle (everything below the waterline). Today I will tackle the water above the water line and then the sky. M is off work tomorrow and we should be able to finish all the animals together tomorrow night. This is the plan anyway! Wish us  luck!

Oh I found some more Big Boys today from Schmidt. One of them appears to be a recent offering while the other two are circa 80s.  Check 'em out! I really want the tall ship. I will see if I can talk  M into it. M told me I have to "slow my roll" on buying the big boys (It is rather expensive to collect all of them)

Underwater section complete for now (A few pieces are still mis sorted in other areas) It always more efficient to move on and tackle large sections then come back to these stragglers

Glacier - 6000pc, Schmidt
I think this puzzle is awesome. It would be a real challenge to say the least!

Anne Geddes: A Composition in Blue and Yellow - 6000pc, Schmidt
I think this now qualifies as the very last puzzle I ever want to assemble! I would rather go insane with Schmidt's 6000 piece monster What a Crowd than this...

Windjammer Voilier Goletta a Vele Quadre Zallschip the Tall Ship Fullriggare (aka Tall Ship) - 6000pc, Schmidt
This is amazing!

Magna Carta - 6000pc from Clementoni

Clementoni's Magna Carta. Magnificat color in this puzzle.
This is the first in our collection of 6000 piece maps and
our first big boy Clementoni.

Claes Janszoon Visscher's Magna Carta - 6000pc from Clementoni is brilliantly colored and printed on fine linen paper. The pieces feel fantastic in hand and have rounded knobs (versus for lack of a better word, ear shaped knobs). They are printed on blue board and look fantastic. I look forward to assembling this one.

It proved to be very difficult to find information about this piece of art on the web. Eventually I found a French blog where the author expressed the same problem I was having. Google returned nothing but results to buy a poster of it and almost no one gave an artists name. Well, it turns out, there is a lot of confusion.

Claes Janszoon Visscher (a.k.a. Nicolaus Ioannis Vischerius or Nicolas Joannes Piscator) was born in 1587 in Amsterdam. His father Nicolas Visscher was a cartographer and taught him the family business. This map shows two hemispheres, separated at the Atlantic Ocean. The two smaller circles depict the signs of the zodiac. Flanking the upper zodiac are depictions of Terra and Aqua (Land and Water). The lower zodiac is flanked by Ignis and Aer (Fire and Air). The inner frame encapsulating the two globes represent the four seasons clockwise from the left: Ver, Aestas, Autumnus, Hiems (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter).

The outer frame shows the 12 months of the year in the vertical columns and in the corners features prominent figures from history, clockwise from the upper left; Ninus, Cyrus the Great, Julius Ceaser, and Alexander the Great.

The top pane depicts each continent and the lower set of drawings illustrates the Charity (Mathew 25 versus 35 and 36); 

35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

One last piece of interesting trivia, Visscher means fisherman and the family signed their work by placing a fisherman somewhere. Can you find it? It took me a while! 

The following are close ups of the map showing each section discussed above.

The Fisherman's signature

New Puzzle Day Part II: How to NOT ship a puzzle

Wedding Feast shipped in
paper and totally fucked up...

With a gapping split, how confident
would you be the pieces were not
all over from here to Germany?

Another fantastic example of how NOT
to ship a puzzle.

Pieces rattling around the bottom of a
busted up open box... not  good sign.

Box wide open in the packing box...
At the very least, seal the box
with tape, better yet, put the pieces in
ziplock bags and seal the box!

So, today is a bittersweet. Three new puzzles showed up including the long awaited Wedding Feast at Cana, yet two out of the three showed up totally fucked up! Wedding feast was shipped in just the puzzle box wrapped in shipping paper all the way from Germany! When I picked it up at the post office, it was split at the seam and most likely had leaked pieces from here to Germany! This is seriously frustrating to wait over a month for a puzzle to find it in this condition.

The other new puzzle, the 6000pc Clementoni Magna Carta (Art. 36504) arrived in a crushed overpacked box (a box twice as large as it should have been) with the puzzle and loose pieces rattling around inside it. Overpacking a box is a good thing, but it needs to be secure inside the box. Not taping the puzzle box shut or placing the pieces in a sealed bag is another faux pas. It should be plainly obvious that you can't just ship these things like that but apparently not.

I really hope the remaining big boys on their way were packed with considerably more care. For now, I am debating on counting 15,000 pieces or just accepting that they are most likely missing pieces. I'm damned if I do and damned if I dont. It will take 16 hours to count all of them, but then again, if you are missing more than a few pieces, who would want to spend the dozens of hours required to build it?

I suppose people have a common misconception that the USPS cares about your package. They do not. I don't know what they do  to these boxes, but it is far from handling them with care! I know I will be explicit in all future puzzle purchases about how to package it correctly! 99% percent of the problems could be solved by sealing the pieces in some sort of bag. There is a reason they come from the manufacturer that way!

Enough bitching... All in all, this really sucks. It's a lesson to me that I need to communicate to people how to properly ship a puzzle here and if there are missing pieces (it is assumed there are) I will just perfect my technique of making my own pieces.

Wedding Feast at Cana

Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana - 9000pc from Ravensburger is the puzzle that started it all for me. I have written about it a bunch here. I finished the majority of this puzzle maybe 10 years ago and it was destroyed in a move. So I am very much looking forward to getting it done finally.

The puzzle itself is of the same era as Tower of Babel and is printed on Ravi's green board (versus the blue board of today) and has shape features of that era as well (Limited knob diversity and location) but is well printed on fine linen paper with great color. A fine reproduction of the original art!

Magna Carta

There was so much to say about this puzzle, I moved it to its own  its own page here.

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Here are some pics from todays haul. Enjoy!

At last, I have her back. She may be damaged, but I will get
her fixed up one way or another. The largest format
of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana.

Clementoni's Magna Carta has magnificant
coloring and the pieces appear to have
great dichotomy of knob curvature. I love
the blue cardboard. These pieces feel great!

Here are the pieces of Wedding Feast at Cana. As you can see, high quality on Ravi's old
style board. In the background is the claim form I suspect I will need to use!