Jigsaw puzzles

During the holidays one finally finds the time to solve some jigsaw puzzles.

I love Fabio Vettori's design. This is my third puzzle with the ants and the amount of detail on these puzzles is insane. Love love love!

 

But I think I am done with the Exits... lovely wolves but not really my cup of tea. Unfortunately.

A floral puzzle

I finally solved the jigsaw puzzle I got for Christmas:

A lovely 2000er.

 

Apologies for the poor quality of the pictures...

So pretty!

 I found the images of this beauty on my phone, from the recent trip to Aquilea:

The pieces fit so perfectly together, you can hardly believe this is a jigsaw puzzle!

Oh, yes, it is. And a beautiful one!

Frustrating waves

I've always been a fan of tiny puzzles. The cuteness of the pieces gets me every time.

However, a tiny puzzle needs to be of super high quality. And this one unfortunately isn't. The shapes are repetitive, sloppily designed and probably even badly cut. The contrast on the colours is poor. There are so many false ways these pieces 'fit' together that it's becoming frustrating. I will of course solve it but it is not the fun I was hoping it to be.

Oh well.

Three random things

1. Talking to a group of my (ex)students, I realised that they do not know who Kraftwerk are.

What are we teaching them?!?

2. I don't often go out. But when I did go out, I sat under this poster.

Is the Universe trying to tell me something?

3. I did another Exit puzzle. While I liked the solution this time, the riddles were just toooo simple. Disappointingly simple.

 

Oh well, I am a very demanding customer.

More puzzles

Two more jigsaw puzzles I did recently.

Some penguins:

And spiders:

Now, this one is interesting as it is some sort of puzzle-jigsaw-puzzle. After you solve it, you start solving the puzzles on the image. They are great fun, whereas the final solution is some sort of a let down.

More puzzles

Just cleaning my memory cards and found a few photos of puzzles I recently did...

And yes, I have a reason for emptying my memory cards ;-)

As usual.

I am about to have quite an important presentation tomorrow. Which means that I should probably be working on it.

Yet my mind ...

is someplace else.

PS. This is my first miniature puzzle. I was squealing from joy when I saw the tiny pieces :-)

Ah, well :-(

We moved a while ago but there were still some boxes in my brother's cellar that we just never moved. They were somehow not top priority. Unfortunately.

Because now that we opened the boxes, the stuff inside was mouldy.

And that was a part of my puzzles. Luckily just a few, but still way too many :-(

My very first puzzle, the Sandmännchen. It says 1973, but I must have gotten it sometime around 1978.

And my very first thousender. A danish harbour from 1981.

And even one of the two-thousanders... Or should I say eight-thousanders ...

My heart is broken :-(

More puzzles

It took me all summer to finally clean my desk - and the moment I did it, I bought a new puzzle :-)

Great picture, btw!

Puzzles

The amount of stress in my life is directly proportional to the amount of distractions I need to somehow stay sane. 

 

Yep, there are lots of them.

Procratsinating

What do you do if you're really behind with your work? And about a year behind with your correspondence? And several months behind with renovation/decoration of the house? And have about 50 important things on your  to-do list?

You buy yourself a jigsaw puzzle. But of course.

Not just any puzzle. A 3D optical illusion puzzle. You see a white piece but when you pick it up, it turns totally dark. Highly psychedelic.

 

But pretty.

Eye of the Tiger

As the title says - eye of the tiger:

Made of just 500 pieces:

More puzzles

God, am I being repetitive... but when I get a jigsaw puzzle, I just have to solve it. This 1000-pieces one took me about eight hours.

Elegy for a Dead Admiral

There's been a lot on my mind recently. Something very good (hopefully, keeping fingers crossed) and something really bad... And everything in between. That's why I needed a distraction.

What can be better than a 1500 pieces jigsaw puzzle :-)

I got Elegy for a Dead Admiral by Jack Vettriano, who is probably my favourite contemporary painter. If I had to pick one piece that I like most, it would probably be this one (In Thoughts of You):

Borrowed from Berliner Bilder Galerie

Anyway, back to the puzzle. The beginning:


And the end:


The puzzle (By Ravensburger) is pure joy! Pieces fitting perfectly, with a huge variety in shape, obviously carefully made with great attention to detail. Love it!

Not perfect

I got a new puzzle!


However, not everything was perfect...


First of all, there were two pieces missing. I've never ever owned a puzzle with a piece missing and this annoys the hell out of me. This is just not right!


And second: the majority the pieces were identical shape-wise. I understand if you want to make a super-difficult puzzle you make all the pieces equal but I fear this was not the case here. Even after the puzzle was "made", I spent about half an hour rearranging the pieces so that they were on the right position. Well, at least I think they were. There should be a special place in hell for designers who design puzzles like this!

32000!

Did you know that Ravensburger makes the largest jigsaw puzzle in the world? No, I do not own it and until I own a huuge house, I won't have the room to make it. But anyway, the puzzle has over 32000 pieces.


All the jigsaw puzzles that I own combined have a bit over 35000 pieces.

When I was younger, my worst fear was that if the burglars came into our house they would search the puzzles for jewelry or money and mix all the pieces together! Now THAT would be an even larger puzzle.

But all of you who solve such large puzzles actually know that the pieces come in separate bags. So technically...

Four cats

Seriously now, how can you give me a jigsaw puzzle and expect me NOT to solve it right away?

Well, it took me six hours to solve this 1000 pieces puzzle.


Four golden cats by Rosina Wachtmeister (Momenti di Felicità):

Peut-être we can ignore ziss Abwesenheit

I grew up in a country where people are used to watching films with subtitles. So I don't mind them - I actually quite like having them especially if you cannot turn up the volume due to a sleeping kid in the room next door.

However, the subtitles one finds in the Internet are often quite crappy. Painful to watch to the point where I decided they need to be improved. So I chose one of the films with the worst subtitle/film quality ratio and started correcting it.

Did you guess which film it was from the title of this post?
La Grande Vadrouille!
Aber natürlisch.



And yes, it is challenging to translate this tri-lingual film. Here some examples:

"Do you promise me que if I bring ici the Big Moustache, you partez avec lui ?"

- Qui êtes-vous ?
- Ich bin mari de la patronne, ich bin maître d’hôtel.
- Ah, comestible, gut, gut « guénéral »
- Non, non, non, je pas essen officier allemand.

The funny this is that after reading this melange of French, English and German, it takes me a few seconsd to realise which language I'm currently translating from. So confusing.

Piece by piece

I looove jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately I don't have much time nor place to do them, but I still manage to do a little one now and then. So I did a 3D one, a 540 piece globe:


It took me two hours to the continents and the islands, and four or five to complete the oceans!




Here I am - here I wanna be!


I'll just add an old photo of the largest puzzle I ever made: a 9000 piece. My apartment wasn't big enough to make the whole puzzle at a time, so I made separate left and right half. Here's one: