Tagged With: Leisure

Jigsaw Puzzle

Photograph taken on Wednesday, January 15, 2020 by Henry
Jigsaw Puzzle

Jigsaw Puzzle

We started working on a puzzle this evening. Cathy had pulled one out to work on over the Christmas break and we finished that in reasonably short order. That one had 500 pieces and was a pretty straightforward task. I bought this one as a Christmas present for Cathy and it promises to be a bit more challenging. It has a scene from Venice, Italy and is cut up into 1,000 pieces. Until the puzzle is nearly done, that’s too big for our card table so I brought up a four foot square piece of wood and put that on top of the table. That’s just about enough room to get all the pieces laid out in a single layer and turned right side up with enough extra space to start putting the sides together.

I happened to read something recently that compared some task with trying to do a puzzle without the aid of the photo on the box. That made me laugh, because that’s the rule in our house. Looking at the box is considered cheating so once a puzzle is put out, the box is put away and not looked at again until it’s all done. You don’t have to follow that rule, if you’d rather not, but that’s the way we work things.

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Ship Puzzle

Photograph taken on Sunday, June 11, 2023 by Henry
Ship Puzzle

Ship Puzzle

It’s time for another installment of Henry and Cathy’s puzzle collection. This one looked nice so I bought it and we finished putting it together a couple days ago. The water in the foreground and the sky were the most challenging parts, which isn’t too surprising. The stern of the ship and parts of the rigging were done first (after the edges, of course, which are almost always finished before much else has been done.

We don’t absolutely always have a puzzle going, but lately we’ve tried to. We’re running out of them, though, with only a few more on hand, so I’m not sure what we’ll do after that. We also like crossword puzzles, sometimes doing them together but more often, separately. We have crossword puzzle books, published by Simon and Schuster and The New York Times. For quite a while now, my mom has saved the puzzles from the Washington Post and gives them to me, so I work through those. They are generally a bit easier than the other two sources and I actually do them in pen (and sometimes without actually making mistakes, although certainly not all the time).

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Bird House Puzzle

Photograph taken on Wednesday, August 30, 2023 by Henry
Bird House Puzzle

Bird House Puzzle

We started this puzzle at the beach. It’s a used puzzle that mom bought. Buying a used puzzle is always a bit of a risk because a missing piece can be so frustrating. As it turned out, there was one piece missing, but of course we didn’t know that until the rest of the puzzle was done.

Last year at the beach we got two large sheets of felt. We put the puzzle together on one of them and when our week at the beach was up we put the other piece of felt over the partially complete puzzle, rolled it up, and put it in a heavy, cardboard tube. That works reasonably well and we unrolled it here without too much fixing to be done. This puzzle in particular was poorly made and the pieces didn’t really stay together very well, but that had more to do with the puzzle than with rolling it up. I’d also put the puzzle on the yellow felt instead of black in the future, because the black made it hard to see where pieces had not been placed. At home, we have a large (4′ by 4′) piece of MDF that sits on a card table and the beige color is generally good as a background.

Another issue with this puzzle, especially while we were at the beach, was that there wasn’t room to put most of the pieces out on the table. So, about half the pieces were still in the box, meaning we’d rifle through the pieces in the box looking for a particular piece. Not idea. Once we got it home, we were able to lay out the other pieces and eventually we finished it.

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Dog Puzzle

Photograph taken on Wednesday, September 06, 2023 by Henry
Dog Puzzle

Dog Puzzle

We finished another puzzle this week. It was sent to us by our good friends, Brian and Lisa. We really enjoyed hiking with their dogs when we were in Alaska in June. Sadly, one of them is gone now, but Ayla and Lucky made the move with them to Oregon. This was a slightly easier puzzle than some we’ve done lately, being only 500 pieces, but we enjoyed it, nonetheless. We’re hoping to have Brian, Lisa, Ayla, and Lucky visit us this fall. This photo isn’t as good as some of the puzzle pictures I’ve been able to take, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Of course, we never know, in any detail, what a puzzle will look like while we’re putting it together. Looking at the box would be cheating.

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Starting a Puzzle

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 27, 2023 by Henry
Starting a Puzzle

Starting a Puzzle

I’ve posted a pictures from time to time of puzzles we’ve completed. Today’s photo is of a puzzle we’ve just started. It’s got drawings of flowers with some text but looks like it’s going to be pretty hard, with a lot of pure white pieces. This is how we start a new puzzle, though. The first step is to turn all the pieces right side up. At the same time, we pull out any edge pieces, known by their straight side, and put those all together. We also move the pieces towards the edge of the table, so that when we have the edges together, most of the pieces are outside that. All the edge pieces that we had found by the time I took this are in the lower left. After this was taken, I started working on the edges and Cathy started grouping other pieces by color, since it appears that each of the flowers is somewhat unique in terms of flower color. Note that looking at the box once the puzzle is out on the table is cheating.

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Wildflower Puzzle

Photograph taken on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 by Henry
Wildflower Puzzle

Wildflower Puzzle

Shortly after Christmas we started a new puzzle (see Wednesday, December 27, 2023). We finished it last night. This was a fairly challenging puzzle due to a combination of reason. First, many of the pieces had nothing on them. Although the background color varied slightly over the width of the puzzle, it didn’t vary much. Furthermore, the pieces were almost all of roughly the same shape. Once we got all the pieces that had any color on them in place, there were about 50 pieces that were pure white. We did eventually get them all together, though. As you can see, there is one piece missing at the top of the white clover. I’m pretty sure we didn’t lose it, but these things happen.

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Mendenhall Puzzle

Photograph taken on Tuesday, February 06, 2024 by Henry
Mendenhall Puzzle

Mendenhall Puzzle

On June 6, 2023, I posted a photo of a common merganser (Mergus merganser) with ducklings on her back. They were swimming on Mendenhall Lake and it was taken at from the glacier overlook. Cathy and I really enjoyed that visit and in addition to the mergansers we saw arctic terns (Sterna paradisaea). Later that same day we returned to the Glacier with our friends Brian and Lisa. The overcast sky had partially cleared and there was a beautiful mix of blue and white, both overhead and in the reflections on the water.

I had this 1000-piece puzzle made from a photograph I took that evening and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. The sky was the hardest part although the water in the foreground was only marginally easier. With our love of puzzles, I think I might make more. But we have a few more waiting to be done, including one Brian and Lisa sent us recently with state flowers and birds.

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State Birds and Flowers

Photograph taken on Thursday, February 22, 2024 by Henry
State Birds and Flowers Puzzle

State Birds and Flowers Puzzle

We finished another puzzle. This one was a gift from our dear friends Brian and Lisa and it proved to be more challenging than expected. The fact that there was text on many of the pieces helped a bit, since that aided in piece orientation. Some of that text helped us know where in the country the piece went, as well, although it was a while before we had enough pieces in place that we could reliably situate many other pieces. The list of birds differs from what we believe are the proper birds. For example, I think seven states have the northern cardinal as their bird, but it only appears three times in the puzzle. But from the standpoint of the puzzle, that hardly matters. Also, at least one of the illustrations don’t seem right to me, but again, it’s a pretty puzzle and we enjoyed it quite a bit.

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Dog Puzzle

Photograph taken on Wednesday, February 28, 2024 by Henry
Dog Puzzle

Dog Puzzle

Some puzzles are harder than others and all else being equal, the more pieces the harder a puzzle is. Most of the puzzles we’ve done lately have been 1,000 piece. So, this 500-piece puzzle was fairly simple. That doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy it. It was give to us by a friend and was in a plastic bag. So, while we never look at the picture on the box while doing a puzzle, we at least have some idea what the picture is of. In this case we had no idea whatsoever. Maureen said she thought there was a dog in it, but that’s all we had to go on.

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Archie McPhee Puzzle

Photograph taken on Sunday, May 12, 2024 by Henry
Archie McPhee Glow Chamber Puzzle

Archie McPhee Glow Chamber Puzzle

Cathy’s brother Jim gave us this puzzle. We thought it was going to be glow-in-the-dark, but it’s just a regular photo of glow in the dark items. The puzzle itself doesn’t glow, which is a shame because that would have been awesome. Anyway, this was a really hard puzzle. Usually you find areas with patters or colors and you can sort of guess the general area where things go. With this, it was similarly colored items all surrounded by black. We had a lot of the individual items put together but it took quite a bit more work before we were able to start placing them in the overall outline. Looking at the box would definitely have helped and this illustrates why that’s cheating.

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