Thoughts on the new big boys

 I have been thinking about this, I think the New York Skyline will be more fun to build. It is a  special challenge to offer a massive format puzzle that is both aesthetically appealing in its completed state and great puzzle to construct.

Take most massive paintings, it would be extremely boring as a 35K puzzle! I think this is why people prefer Educa's Life and Wildlife to Ravensburgers Double Retrospect. After looking carefully at new york. I think it will be great to assemble because of all the detail. Other new york puzzles (Ravensburger 12,0000 with the dumb saturn in the sky) are not realistic or monotonous whereas the new one is neither.

What do you guys think?

Ravensburgers new 32,000pc offering. Fantastic overall image and great detail at the piece level. Considering Ravensburgers awesome fit and finish, this puzzle will be a pleasure to assemble! Probably my most anticipated puzzle.

Educa's new 33,600pc Wildlife. I think on the piece level, it will be great to assemble but the overall image is not to my taste. Seems everyone is this animal illustration kick. 

12,000pcs - This is gonna suck. Monotonous and at the end of the day, its completely unrealistic.

Ravensburger's new 32,000pc New York Puzzle

Ravensburgers New York Skyline at 32,000pcs! Look for this in September 2014!

Looks like Ravensburger had a new 32,000 piece puzzle coming and decided they could not let Educa have all the fun today. 2 Hours after Educa announced their new record breaking 33,600 piece puzzle, Ranensburger dropped on their Facebook page that they have new 32,000pc Skyline of New York City! This is the sneak peek they put up on the Germany Facebook page. I look forward to seeing the rest! One thing is for sure, if it is anything like Double Retrospect, it will be a pleasure to assemble but with a cityscape this large, it will be a nightmare!

It looks like the detail of the photography is suburb. This could actually be a real pleasure to assemble!

Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 26

M working on Summer Porch while I a work on the Feast 

Wow, where is the time going? M and I puzzled for the better part of the weekend and I feel like I made a lot of progress! M has been working hard on her Summer Porch and I have completed the bulk of the Wedding Party.

I think I have identified at least three missing pieces. Two are edge pieces and one is a bright yellow piece in the guy pouring the wine from the water carafe. Its going to be tuff to make that piece for sure! I had forgotten about the missing pieces until this weekend when I realized they weren't there!

I really love the Wedding Feast, the colors are just fantastic.

M is really making progress on the John Powell's Summer Porch - 1,500pc by Big ben!

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 22

The Wedding Feast at Cana - 9000pc by Ravensburger. This thing is going slow but it is so beautiful!

This puzzle seems to be taking forever! It feels like I am about 1/4 of the way done with it after 22 days of puzzling! It is much slower going when doing a big one all at once! Today was a good day though, I actually was able to puzzle for about 5 hours and laid down a good 300 pieces or more. (my guess). I have been slowing down on puzzling lately overall and working harder on other things so I guess its understandable that its taking so long.

Also, our puzzle from Hong Kong arrived! More motivation to get this one out the door!


-Thomas

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.

Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 13

The Wedding Feast at Cana - 9000pc after 13days of effort.

M and I took a couple days off of puzzling to go sailing but last night I managed to set down for an hour or so and work on more red. I will spend two more hours on red before calling the rest misfits and moving on to orange.

Yesterday was also new puzzle day! The Springbok 500pc Round Puzzle of a Puzzle showed up! This one looks like a lot of fun! The colosr are bright and has the traditional Springbok irregular cut and extremely tight fit. This should fulfill my puzzle of a puzzle fantasy!

This should be a challenge!

Great colors and shapes from this puzzle. Nice work Springbok

Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 10-12

Not a lot of progress really. We have been busy having fun sailing but I managed to get the red pieces organized and have but down around 180 pieces or so. Here is the cellist and Jesus. Turns out Jesus has two of the four broken pieces inside him. He is Wholly!

Jesus is coming along nicely but he has two of the four broken pieces in him....

The Cellist

Wedding Feast: Day 8-9

It took two days, but I am finally done with green. There are just a few stragglers left so its time to move on. Red is next, then orange then back to all of the stragglers before I move on to the sky.

Slow but steady - Green is now done.

Wedding Feast: Day #7

As you can see, there is still a lot of green to go! After green, I think I might tackle the sky. They sky should not be too bad. The pieces are easily identifiable as to what orientation they fit in and it appears that like maps, they contain rows of "odd" pieces which greatly aids in the finding of pieces! Occasional it appears that there are a pair of ultra "odd" pieces in a non "odd" piece row. But these appear to always come as a pair of a three knob/three receptacle piece so that the pair would continue the otherwise normal 2knob/2receptacle pattern. I included a pic of the 6 type/orientation pieces below.

He is coming together nicely. I need to figure out whom he is supposed to be. Anyone know?

These are all of the different pieces/orientation in the Ravensburger's 9000 pc Wedding Feast at Cana. The "standard" shapes at right are easily distinguishable between vertical and horizontal pieces. The puzzles appears to contain entire rows of non-standard pieces which makes finding them very easy. Occasionally, their are a pair of the vertical orientation 3 prong and 3 receptacle pieces. In a sort of over 500 pieces, there were only about 8 of these pieces. 

The vertical 3 prong and horizontal 3 receptacle are always placed next to each other in a row of normal pieces. These are found very infrequently in the die.

The state of things. It's nice to finally be able to lay out the entire puzzle with the puzzle table extension complete.

Wedding Feast: Day 6

After my 11 day diversion with Trionfo degli Asburgo, I am back to the Wedding Feast at Cana. I really like hoping from puzzle to puzzle! Today I was craving some Double Retrospect! I think I will go back to doing a section of that next. But who knows what will take my fancy by the time I get done with the Feast.

I only really managed about 50 pieces of green. Pics tomorrow!

Wedding Feast: Day 5 - Yellow and Blue

Last night I wen after yellow and blue. I was tired after a super long day of work, so I didn't get a lot done. I am falling behind for sure on getting this done in 20 days, but I I hope to rip off the sky in one day which will be about 2000 pieces.

Today I am going to try and modify the puzzle table to fit this beast all at once so I can start placing pieces. I also need to mount our slice of life and oh yeah, we are having a BBQ party and I have to work.....

Anyhow, here are the progress pics from yesterday.

Bits and Pieces coming together after tackling yellow and blue

Blue guy in throne

Servant pouring the wine from the water vessel into a decanter

No feast is complete with music

The Band

The musicians table

Jesus

Wedding Feast: Day 4

Well I finally was able to start puzzling. Today I managed to get 560 pieces together (most of which was the border). The border is 120x76pieces if you are ever wanted to know. It turns out this puzzle is 10 pieces too long to fit on our table in it's entirety. I may think about how to add 8 inches to the table but for now, it is what it is.

Day 4 has come and gone and I am 1,440 pieces behind my goal of 500pieces a day. I guess that's what happens when it takes 3 days to sort it. I have a lot of work to get done this week, so this might not happen, but what the heck, that's what goals are for.

Here are the progress pics:

Miles of Border

The Bride!

The servant pouring the water wine (this was Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine)

An Uncle maybe? He is inspecting the Miracle

Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 3 (Sorting Complete)

I finally finished sorting tonight and now I can get started on actual puzzling. So far my puzzling rate has been two pieces in about 9 hours (that't not counting the 8 hours of counting)

Here is the state of affairs, 9,118 pieces to go!

That was a LOT of sorting and its really only the beginning. Secondary and Tertiary sorting are still in order plus there is a lot of misfits... This is going to be hard. If I can manage 500 pieces a day, its 20 days out....

Life - Section A Complete / Wedding Beast: Day 3

Hi! We finished the firs section of Life!!!

Last night M finished up the first section of Life while I continued to sort the Wedding Beast. She did such a great job! I think she did about 700 pieces in one sitting! This wasn't enough for her either, she started on the 1000 piece Color Palette puzzle just as soon as she was done.

While we were moving life onto a board to clear the puzzle table, we had a lot of trouble. It was a two person job for sure and plenty of pieces came off and had to be reassembled. Life, as it turns out, is real lose, a bit of a whore if you will So, be careful with her, she is lose, you can't just toss her around like a tight little Springbok.

Oh yeah, at first we thought we were missing three pieces, ok we were missing three pieces. We found one in the sofa, and the other two we tracked down were inside the main box in the plastic bag the pieces came in. Turns out they never made it out of the bag!

Anyhow, all pieces were accounted for and now we have to figure out what the heck to do with it. Right now we are most likely going to mount it to foam and put underneath the puzzle table so you can see it when the table is raised.

M is powering through the last section of Life today!

25 days to complete the first 6,000 pieces!

The first two pieces of Wedding Feast...
9,118 to go!

Color Palette - 1000pc, Master Pieces
Available from Amazon.com
Started: 7/15/2013 (View Posts)

M cant get enough today, she started on Color Palette...

And so it begins: Wedding Feast (a.k.a. Beast) at Cana - Day 1

Today I started sorting the beast! 9000 pieces all together feels more like a million. I really am having trouble deciding what to sort some of the pieces into. Someone recently asked me about sorting, and this is the technique I am using on this puzzle.

First I am taking my 1000 piece bags (from the counting yesterday) and flipping every piece over. Then I sort out obvious; edge, colors, sky, architecture, outfits and faces. This leaves behind a lot of dark or random or pieces I would have to spend a lot of time hunting in the poster to figure out what the heck it is. I have decided to leave these pieces flipped over (about half of the first batch). This should work out across each bag so that in the end, I will have about 10 sections of pieces and 5 boards of lose pieces to hunt throw as I do each section when I need more pieces.

I also dont just leave my board of mixed pieces just one big pile. I always put some divided a board into about 6 to 8 sectors so that while searching, you can focus your eyes on a small sector. It helps to keep from overloading your brain and know you have searched it before moving to the next sector, I find it extremely helpful, your mileage may very.

I started sorting Wedding Feast at Cana. You can see I have 10 sorting containers and what is left is put into sectors to make it easy to look through.

23 Men Down

Counting the Wedding Feast (Twice...). Notice I placed 100 in 10 sections.

You may remember that I received the Wedding Feast at Cana (9,120pc from Ravensburger) a while back and it was all jacked up! The seller of this ebay auction simply dumped the 9000 pieces in the box and wrapped it in paper, and thought it should make it 5000 miles to me just fine.

Well it didn't (understatement), and although the seller disagreed with me, ebay buyer protection did, and refunded all of my money. It's only fair, it wasn't my fault the seller was an idiot and her actions most assuredly left puzzle pieces from here to Germany.

Last time I had to count pieces, I made stacks of 10. This was
I think I pretty good method now that I have been through
the other way.

So anyhow, last night I decided to take stock of the state of affairs and start counting this puzzle. Previously when I counted a puzzle, I would make stacks of 10 pieces enabling me to visually check that each stack was the correct height. This seemed like a very slow way to do things, so I tried just counting sets of 10, making a collection of 100, then 500 at a time put them in a plastic bag (so that I would have 9 bags plus a small 120 piece bag at the end)

This seemed to go really fast, and in fact I counted all 9000 pieces in 3.5 hours. When I got done the first time, I was missing something like 37 pieces. So I started thinking, that was weird, and I remembered several times I would accidentally make a 6th column when I was counting my 100 pieces. If I did this and matched it up, that would be 20 pieces short and if I did that twice, that would be 40 and maybe somewhere along the line, I made a 3 piece mistake..... so I started counting the now 9 bags of 1000 over.

I decided to recount and make neat little rows of 10 pieces so I could count easily inspect that I had exactly 10 pieces. This was way faster than stacks!

My own, my Precious.

The first bag was a piece short, so now I was up to 38 missing pieces, the second bag had 3 extra pieces lowering the count to 35 missing pieces! The fifth bag had 19 extra dropping the count to 16 but finally the ninth bag was missing 3 pieces for a total of 19 missing pieces.

Lesson learned: If you are going to count a 9,120 piece puzzle, do it very methodically so you don't have to do it again...

So.......


It's a sad state of affairs for this puzzle. It has 19 missing pieces and 4 broken ones (as you can see form the previous post.) What would you do? My first reaction was to say F this puzzle, but I slept on it and thought, what would you do if this was the last copy of Wedding Feast at Cana on the planet? I mean, its WAY out of print, it is possible that I might not be able to get another copy of it, or if I do, it too could be lost or damaged in shipping....

M came home and I explained the situation and I told her I wasn't going to do it. I do happen to know where I can get a sealed copy and who would do a puzzle missing 23 pieces.... but then I thought, what would I do with this puzzle? Just throw it away? Toss it out because its previous owner was abusive?

No! 

This will not do! 

I will build you!

If your piece is missing, I will make you a new one! If your piece is broken, I will mend it! I will not leave you to be buried like some piece of rotting garbage! You will live!

YOU WILL LIVE MY PRECIOUS!!!!!!

Interactive Map Double click to zoom in and click and drag to move the image around (You can also use the controls in the upper right)

Change of Plan

Mercedes really loves Life and doesn't want me to do it without her so I am not allowed to finish it tonight. We decided that since I have a thing for the really big difficult ones that I will just work on those and she can do life. I will help from time to time and she may help me when the mode strikes, but she wants nothing to do with some of the really big hard ones.

So..... I decided to start counting Wedding Feast at Cana tonight. Check out the piece I found!

New Puzzle Day: The Temptation of St. Anthony, 12,144pc

Yesterday, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony - 12,144pc from Ravensburger showed up (at the same time as Sistine Chapel). This is the original really big puzzle. It was released in 1983 and was the undisputed worlds largest puzzle for nearly 20 years until it was unseated by Clementoni’s 13,200 pressing of Tiziano Vecelli’s Sacred and Profane Love in 2002. It is our first 12,000 piece puzzle.

The puzzle itself is still sealed in 4 bags. The pieces are on light green board and the knobs are less eared than their Wedding Feast at Cana or 4 Historical World Maps (It reminds me much more of a Clementoni cut). When assembled, this big boy will be the actual size of the original painting at 7.9ft x 5.5ft

Here is what Ravi has to say about this puzzle:

Hieronymous Bosch (Jheronimus van Aken) was born in ‘s-Hertogenbosch approx 1450 and buried there on 9/8/1516. 

Of the painters who lived around 1500, Hieronymous Bosch was certainly the most enigmatic. Little of nothing is really known about his life. Unlike his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), he left no notes or comments on his works. In the parish register of this birthplace, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, he is first mentioned in 1480 as Jheronimus van Aken, son of Anthonis van Aken. Although the family can be traced back to living in ‘s-Hertogenbosch since 1399, it isn’t thought that they originally came from Aachen. Both his father Anthonis and his grandfather Jan were painters. Hieronymous van Aken travelled widely and was commissioned by many foreign patrons. Perhaps a wish to honor his brithplace made him call himself Hieronymous Bosch. 

His paintings show Hieronymous Bosch to be a very astute and critical observer of this time. It is mostly the faults and the dark side that he pinpoints in very unusual and wildly fantastic allegories. An abundance of detail, strange apparitions, demons, innumerable fantastic and bizarre creatures, have led to very many and often contradictory interpretations of his works. 

The Temptation of St. Anthony, one of his later works, is also one of the most inaccessible because of its overabundance of allegorical detail.
There are 2 passion scenes on the outside panels of this triptych: on the left, the capture of Christ, and on the right, Christ carrying the cross.
On the left-hand panel the saint is carried off into the air by demons. He resists them and they release him, to fall to the ground. There he is found and saved by the monks of his order. 

On the right-hand panel temptation comes in the shape of a beautiful nude woman. St. Anthony, however, armed with his bible, is looking away. 

The composition of the middle panel is striking: the saint’s head is exactly at the intersection of the diagonals. He is looking at the onlooker, with a gesture of giving benediction. At his feet three priests with animal faces are celebrating a black mass. A witches’ Sabbath is going on behind hi. From the left, the storm troop of the Inquisition is approaching with two dogs in amour (The Dominican Friars, the main agents of the Inquisition, used to call themselves God’s blood hounds). But the whole is built upon the unsafe foundation: mud water and rubble give us an idea of the coming end. 

This painting is in the Museo Naciaonal de Arte Antiga is Lisbon

Interactive Map Double click to zoom in and click and drag to move the image around (You can also use the controls in the upper right)

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.

---

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!