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!

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 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!

Paolo Veronese: Wedding Feast at Cana

Paolo Veronese: Wedding Feast at Cana

I am very excited to start on this puzzle. It is a very special puzzle to me and very special painting in history. We will soon be working on the 9000 piece version of this puzzle by Ravensburger

The Wedding Feast is a 450 year old painting by the late Paolo Veronese. The piece was commissioned in 1562 by the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy, and completed in fifteen months by the year 1563. It hung in the refectory of the monastery for 235 years, until it was plundered by Napoléon in 1797, and shipped to Paris. The painting was cut in half for the journey and stitched back together in Paris where it remains as the largest painting the Louvre (22ft tall by 32.6 ft long).

The painting itself depicts the first miracle of Christ, it is said that during the feast, the wine was running out so Jesus asked the water vessels be filled with water and brought to him, upon which you turned them to wine.

The Bride and Groom. I actually don't know whom is the groom in this photo. I suppose if I  was more up on my art history I would know...

I just love the detail of this painting, and I have a thing for parrots.

Jesus and Mary depicted with glowing halos as prescribed by the period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(religious_iconography)

Here they are thought to be butchering lamb representing Jesus as the Lamb of God (The ultimate sacrificial offering)

The Wedding Feast At Cana. A High Resolution version available here

While searching about the net on this piece, I came across this interpretation of the biblical story. I really don't care if it's true, but, this is the kind of God I believe in and makes me want to complete this puzzle!

It was such a wonderful wedding feast! The music, the dancing, the food and wine. There was a burst of joy just then and Mary looked over at a table where Jesus and his companions had gathered. Jesus had finished his story and the whole table had dissolved in laughter. Mary shook her head with a smile. He captivated people with his stories.

She leaned against the tall, empty water jars as she watched. Her heart filled with such love as she looked at him.

She remembered how thirty years ago, she and Joseph had carried the newborn into the temple in Jerusalem. An old man named Simeon had come up to them and asked to hold their child. With tears in his eyes, he held the baby aloft, thanking God. “I have seen your salvation!” he prayed. Anna, one of the temple ancients, had heard Simeon and joined them. She, too, prayed aloud in thanks, and then began waving bystanders over to see the child. Mary and Joseph exchanged glances and wondered again at this child.

But the other words Simeon had spoken that day were words she prayed with each morning. That long ago day in the temple, in that small crowd around Anna and Joseph, Simeon had turned to Mary and said quietly, “This child will be the cause of the fall and rise of many in Israel.” Then he touched her shoulder gently. “And you, dear mother, will have your heart pierced in pain.”

She and Joseph had talked about this after they left the temple and in the years after. They knew that Jesus was sent by God. She remembered the words of Gabriel. But he was also just … Jesus. He was their little boy who had played in the sawdust of the workshop, run through the streets of their tiny town with the other boys and learned his scriptures.

Since that long ago day in the temple, Joseph had died, and Jesus had been her support and companion. They knew each other’s hearts so well. She watched as he often left the house, wandering out into the desert to pray. She, too, asked the Lord each day to open her own heart. “I know you have called him for a special reason,” she would pray each morning. “Let me be willing to let him go. Let me recognize when it is his time.”

She had not pushed him into marriage, even though most of his friends were long since married. She would love grandchildren. Jesus would be such a good father, as Joseph had been. But as she prayed for freedom in her heart, she knew she could only follow the choices Jesus made. And so a few months ago, Jesus had left home, saying he needed to teach. She had blessed her son and sent him out with a prayer.

Since he left home, she had heard from some of her kin the story of Jesus’ baptism at the River Jordan and the clouds parting and the voice saying, “This is my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.” They were astonished at it, but when Mary heard the story, the truth of it rested quietly in her heart. Of course.

She was suddenly brought back from her memories to this wedding feast by the whispers next to her as the groom looked wildly around. “Out of wine? How could that be?!” he asked. He knew that it would be a dishonor on his bride and her family to run out of wine at their wedding feast. He looked frantic and lost.

Mary saw Jesus stroll outside into the courtyard and she walked out to join him, stopping him with a little hug. “Joshua,” she said tenderly, using his childhood nickname. He wrapped his arms around her and put his cheek to hers.

“Imma,” he said warmly, using the most familiar form of Mother. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked. She nodded at him and searched his face and the warm, dark eyes she knew and loved so well. Today she sensed something different in him and in herself. She felt divided. She wanted to keep him close, to protect him, to be with him. She didn’t want to let him go.

It was her old struggle with fear. Was she protecting him – or herself too? The words would come back to her: Your heart will be pierced…. But as she did over and over each day, she turned her spirit to the Lord. “Open my heart. Give me the freedom to let him go. Let me not be afraid.”

Then suddenly, she knew. Standing there in the courtyard embracing her son, she understood. It was his time.

She looked up at him. “Joshua … they have run out of wine.” It was all she said.

He looked past her into the house at the family and saw from their discomfort that it was true. Their host was having whispered conversations with headwaiters, servants and uncles all at once.

“Imma,” he said then paused with an imperceptible shake of his head. “I’m not …. It’s not….” He stopped and looked into the dark eyes that matched his own. “Not yet,” he hesitated.

Her struggle was over. She smiled at him in peace and left him in the courtyard to pray to his abba, as he always did. Mary was not sure what this all meant; only that she had to say to him, “They are out of wine.”

She walked back into the house and said softly to the servants, “I know you need some help. Just do whatever Jesus asks you to do.” They looked bewildered but nodded their heads.

After a while, Mary saw Jesus return to the house with a deep serenity in his eyes. He walked up to two servants and gestured to the water jars lining the walls. “Fill these with water.” They were confused – the ceremonial washings were already over. Who needed more water in these jars? But they did as he asked.

“Now, draw out a cup” he said gently, “and take it to the headwaiter.” He walked back to his table. It made no sense but they remembered Mary’s words and so carried a brimming cup to the headwaiter. He took a sip, glanced over at their full jars and smiled for the first time today. “Where did you get this?” The two servants looked at each other open-mouthed but the steward didn’t wait for an answer.

Mary watched as the headwaiter called the groom over and chuckled in relief. “You have this magnificent wine – and you saved it? When I serve a wedding, I usually use the best wine at the beginning but this is a perfect taste – and you saved it for so late in the feast!”

She watched the bridegroom’s puzzled face but the steward had already turned away, giving orders to the servants to serve the wine. The music began again and the bridegroom shrugged and rejoined the festivities.

Mary felt joy and peace. As she moved to rejoin the women’s table, she glanced over at the servants. They were whispering to other servants and pointing to Jesus. It had begun. His life would never be the same. Neither would hers.

She sat on the end of the bench and paused for just a second, quietly opening her hands on her lap, whispering, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.” Then she turned back to the women at the table.

I copied this from http://bit.ly/16CxSs3