Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Every Day I'm Puzz-uhling

As I mentioned, having my first solo weekend at home in ... years? ... I was excited to break out a new puzzle, especially since one of my best friends said she'd come over and help.

It's taking over my life.  It's 2000 pieces and soooo hard!  

Friday night, it was just the shrink-wrapped box: 


This puzzle was a gift from one of my best friends, and I could tell it was good when I saw this sticker:


Although I have a sneaking suspicion "lost piece service" will not be quite as helpful as I want.  I'm envisioning something where I call and say, "I'm looking for the piece that is under the right side of the vault in the second bridge arch from the left, it looks like it should be salmon colored on the right half, darker purple on the left half, and have the 'out' prongs on the horizontal, and here is a photo of the remaining pieces laid out on my table, please tell me which one it is."  Instead, it probably works like this, "I'm done with the puzzle but one piece is missing, the 33rd row down, and it would be the 19th piece from the left, could you please mail it to me?" 

Anyway, the puzzle description was in a bunch of languages, including Spanish AND Catala.  Anyway, in English, it extolled the virtues (upside down for some reason) of the non-reflective surface, which is quite nice.  Yeah, that's me, living the high-end puzzle life thanks to my Christmas gift!


Saturday at noon, this was the status.  All pieces right side up, edge pieces closest to the camera (and a few easy edge parts built), the remainder roughly grouped by color for the sky/water, and the right half of the table was everything that appeared to be other than sky and water:


It was immediately clear that we wouldn't be able to work on the puzzle on the table unless we added a leaf.  I usually do 1,000 piece puzzles, so this was twice as big.  So we parted the sea of pieces and added one leaf to the table. 

Here we are Saturday around 6:00 p.m.  You can't see it really, but over on the right side of the table where I was sitting, I had put together most of the church dome: 


Saturday night at bedtime.  Edges done (but needs to be moved up on table so it will fit), San Pietro built, part of the Trastevere sidewalk done, and the grates on the bridge built all the way across the puzzle:


Here is Monday morning before work.  Lots of progress on the arches of the bridge:


Tuesday morning before work.  Harder to see the changes, but on the left side, the upper half of the bridge is now done, and a few miscellaneous pieces that were missing are now filled in:

 
Unfortunately, I haven't taken one this morning.  Suffice it to say that it's slow going right now...

8 comments:

  1. I think this is the first year we didn't buy ourselves a Christmas puzzle ... and now that the weather is getting nice it won't happen until fall. Love seeing yours - definitely keep us informed as you near the finish :)

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    1. Every time you mention your tradition of family puzzles, I'm jealous!

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  2. You always make me want to buy a puzzle! My mom and I used to do them together when I was little. Hmmm. Maybe I should buy her one for Mother's Day & offer to do it with her. I think she'd love that.

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    1. Do it! I think time/experience gifts are best for pretty much everyone except possibly kids who just really want toys, but I think the time is especially important with parents as adults.

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  3. One year, we were dreadfully snowed in for over a week. My family of nine (at the time...it's eleven now!) completed four gigantic puzzles, and the very last one was missing a piece. Oh how I wish we'd had lost puzzle piece services then!

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    1. Ha, that would have made me crazy. I actually don't remember ever doing one that was really missing a piece. But pretty much every puzzle, I swear a piece is missing until I get to the very end, and it was there all along, just not colored exactly as I expected.

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  4. something i keep wanting to do is puzzles. i love doing them. but, my table is always stacked with stuff. it's so annoying. maybe once i've bought a house and have a dining room and a breakfast nook? i can use one for crafting and one for puzzling? haha.

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    1. Our house (condo) isn't that big, so we just have the dining room table and we eat at TV trays when it's puzzle time. The sacrifice! Haha.

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