1/8 th DONE!

Yes,
Finally,
I made it.

All the pink pieces (except 3!) are down!

Don't worry I'll put them down, but really it wasn't worth my time trying to find where they belong.
I did look, but couldn't find it and I will find the spots eventually. For now they are laying on the side.

So here are pictures from what I've got so far:

(If you want to see a bigger picture you can find them here:
Picasa album Dubble Retrospect

And now you ask?

The next colour to do is orange. Not sure if there is light and dark orange, but I think so.
(Or must I say I HOPE so!)

But for now I need to make my Christmas cards ASAP! So no more working on this puzzle for the time being. It will probably be 2015 when I start on the Orange.

To rotate or not to rotate.

My head has been going from confused to understanding to confused again and I think now I understand it a bit.

What am I talking about? The cutting pattern.

Because the drawing on this puzzle is so simple, it is hard to find pieces according to the image. It's easier and faster to try and find the same shaped pieces. To do this efficiently I need to figure out how the cutting pattern is repeated over the whole puzzle.

The day before yesterday, I told Pim that I had found out that the pattern rotated 180 degrees. So the right top corner of Image 26 matched a bottom left corner of an other image.

But then yesterday, when I was trying to figure out what images I saw this in, I saw that top right corners of both images matched. So I thought I was confused the evening before and didn't mention it in my blog, I even told Pim that apparently my crazy idea of rotation was just confusion.

Than today I was confused again because suddenly the pattern was rotated again. Turns out I was looking at 3 different images: the top right corner of Image 18 matched Image 26 AND the left bottom corner of Image 3!

Since I already have found pieces of the same shape I tried to figure out to what image they belonged. With the rotating pattern and the fact that pieces of different images get mixed sometimes, it is really hard and hair pulling sometimes.

So I know for sure that the patterns of Image 26 and 27 are 180 degrees turned. And Image 3 has the same orientation as 27 but rotated to 26.

For now this is my conclusion:
Image 2 , 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26 and 30 have the same cutting pattern
Image 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27 and 31 have the same cutting pattern too, but turned 180 degrees.

The question now is what about the others?

I will know for sure once I'm done with all the pink.

Getting annoyed!

It's been a while since I last posted something but  I didn't touch my puzzle for about 2 months. We were traveling and had a lot of guests, so the puzzle stayed tucked away.

Until last week, when I finally pulled it out again.
Here is where I left off:

It took a couple of days to get used to it again. It was slow, really slow.

But yesterday I had an idea. I had already put away the light pink that was done, but maybe I could mach patterns!

It worked. Above you see image 26 (backwards bending guy) and underneath image 18.

Now, this seems like great progress, and it is great progress, so why would I get annoyed you might ask.
Well, while putting together that nice piece of puzzle I find all those pieces that fit, but don't mach!
Take a look:

These 3 rows have the same shaped pieces. the top row is ok, but in the two rows underneath the pieces fit, but the drawing doesn't mach. There must be more versions, but I just can't find all the other pieces!

The biggest dilemma here is what do I do with it? keep it like this, put it aside and try to remember I have these pieces lying somewhere, or take it apart and put them back in my sorted pieces by shape? I'm not sure yet! Maybe I will take away the pieces that clearly don't belong and keep the rest.

Will keep you posted.

Skylines of the World

Today no puzzling! I didn't have time...

So why make a blogpost here, on "Making a big big puzzle"?

Wel I did put down 18.000 pieces yesterday and today again!

What did I do? Well, Pim and I glued the previous puzzle that I made. That's the 18.000 piece puzzle "Skylines of the World".

It a 18240 piece puzzle that shows four night skylines of big cities. It includes New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Singapore.
Skylines of the World is the second puzzle over 10.000 pieces that I made. I don't know exactly when I started. I was still busy with the second half of my first >10.000 piece puzzle (The creation of Adam) in January of 2010.  So I probably started it around the second half of 2010.
At the end of Oktober, I was about a third done with the puzzle, when I saw that there was a misprint in the picture!

Can you find the mistake?
Because it took a couple of e-mails and a clarifying picture before the people from Ravensburger noticed that something was really wrong with my puzzle.

In the end they sent me a complete new puzzle. Which meant that I could start all over!
I think I started it again in January of 2011 and I was done April 2014. Puzzling off and on (sometimes I had a break of over half a year before continuing) it took a little over 3 years to finish it.

Since I don't really have the space to hang this puzzle, I donated it to the Google office in Zürich to hang it on the wall. So yesterday Pim and I went to the Google office to build the frame and glue the top of the puzzle.

First came the woodwork!

Than the laying down of 18.240 pieces!

Done! This was the first time I saw the whole puzzle in one piece!

This is the gue that comes on top of the puzzle, so the pieces are protected and they stick together.

It dried overnight and today we went back to glue the puzzle to the frame and painted the frame around the puzzle.

Not even two thirds done, we ran out of glue!

Luckily there is a small paper store at Bahnhof Enge, that had some small bottles of paper glue!
And we could finish.

Then came the painting, not much of it, because the border isn't big!

And we are done! Now the only thing left to do is let it dry overnight and than the nice people at Google can hang it up on the wall.

With this next to it. Pim made an info plaque that features my name!!

Little progress in over a week and than today!

So what did I do over the last week? Wel, I put down some pieces.

I didn't have whole days to puzzle, but in between things, I was still able to get some progress.

It's not that much, but what is nice is that I found out to what images some pieces fit. So because I kept on forgetting to what image certain pieces belonged, I mark them with post it notes and their number.

I also found another set of identical pieces. Most of the pieces I have 5 times. 5! That seems odd, but I'm sure I will figure out why that is. (probably 4 times a border and one time the inside of a figure?)

I also found my missing solid light pink pieces! I was actually looking through the solid dark pink pieces to find some that still had a tiny amount of black. And when I put them in a bigger box to look at them the light pink pieces popped-up.

Yesterday evening, I found something else ...
There are only two images that have black spots in the pink, image 9 and 13.
And one of those images (9) has smaller spots than the other one, so small that they could fit on one piece, so I was able to find some of those pieces and put them together.

And then today ... Finally some real progress!

Image 9 is almost done with pink. I'm hoping that piecing together the pink of Image 13 will be even quicker, since they have the same shape as the pieces I just put down for Image 9!

Slow start with dark pink

Yesterday I took out the rest of the pink.
Those are all of the pieces that have any bit of dark pink.

So I had already sorted them by color combinations. But that left me with a LOT of pink-black pieces.
So there was some more sorting to do.
The kind that I will have to do over and over. I sorted them by shape. (remember, I mentioned in an earlier post the 8 different shapes I always sort in)

Than I started to lay them out.
First I did the "special" shapes.
When I came to the 2 "normal" shapes I had a little problem, there were a LOT of them.
I made the decision to lay the ones on the board with the straightest pink-black line. I figured they would make the boarder of some images and they would be easier to assemble.
I put them down in a way that would be easy for me to check if the pink-black line would connect to the piece that I already have.  So they are laid down by image on the piece, instead of my "normal" curvy holes and curvy hooks facing the same side together. If I do this here, the "straight" line will be facing every direction. Anyway ... Here is the result:

Than I tried to fit some pieces together ....


You see the couple of rows I have on the picture below? That probably took from 9:00 this morning until 15:00 this afternoon (with some small breaks in between).

NOT a great result!

But then.... I found this:

                                  

It's the left border of the middle Image, Image 21.

Now this is progress. 

So I continued but ....

a little later I found this: 

What's the problem with those 3 pieces? Wel the 2 on the left are identical And they both fit the right one:

But that's not all, it get's worse!

turns out there are 4 identical pieces! The shapes are exactly the same, the color is slightly different and the black-white line on the lower pieces is in a slightly different position.

And then it get's better!!

Because once you find one neighbour you know that there are 3 exactly the same shape of pieces to find. And if my sorting is any good, they should be in the neighbourhood!

You can see that when I stopped the image wasn't identical anymore. Maybe next time I will find the pieces that mach the left side!

So what is the end result of the whole day puzzling? 

This:

Compared to a "normal" coloured puzzle of around 4000 pieces not a great result, but it's a start.

I hope next time (not tomorrow, because I have other things to do) it will go a little quicker, but I don't have high hopes. I think that after a couple of more hours puzzling straight borders I will have to resort my "normal" shaped pink-black pieces in order to speed up the process. 

Overview

I probably should have made this post a little earlier, but better late than never!

This is a closer look on the pictures in the puzzle.

The images I already worked on are all on the right.
As said in my earlier post I decided to number them.
For now I also name them, but I think I will forget what I used to call the image and then invent another name. So I numbered them like this:

The reason I have them numbered this way is because the image that comes with the puzzle is folded this way. 

So on the front I see number 1- 8, then 9-16, then 17-24 and on the back 25-32.

Having some fun with numbers:

Yesterday my dad had a nice questing. 

How big is one image? 

Let me start with saying that the whole puzzle is 544 x 192 cm. (I can not believe I never mentioned this before, like in my first post!)

This would mean that 1 image is 68 x 48 cm. But that's not what he wanted to know because he wants to have an idea of the size of the pictures I make. 

Well, I measured the width of image 26 (in between outside of black lines), that is 58, 5 cm. 

Now the hight I can't measure yet because I don't have a whole black line. But I'm guessing it's something around 40 cm

So one image is about 58 x 40 cm, not including the white boarder in between images. 

If we woud make one puzzle without all the white that would make a total puzzle of: 464  x 160 cm .

Since the whole puzzle is 544 x 192 cm. That means there is 80 x 30 cm of white! Just plain white! Oh, and a border :)

Another fun number: according to amazon the pieces weigh 17 kg. I actually forgot to weigh the puzzle, would have been fun. somewhere else I read 19 kg. maybe that is with the box. In any case the puzzle is delivered with a trolley!

Light pink DONE!

First milestone.

All he light pink pieces that I had sorted out are put down.

Remember that I was missing a complete line of solid pink pieces on Image 26 (backwards bending guy)? Wel, turns out they were just laying there, waiting to be put in the right spot.

I also found the hands of Image 30 (diving guy).

 AND! I still had a part of Image 28, dolfin-man, laying around!

So... if you take a closer look at that first picture, you will notice ...  RIGHT!

I'm missing pieces!

6 solid light pink pieces to be exact! I haven't tried to find them yet. I think that while sorting I tossed a hand full of pieces in the wrong container. Could be any of the other 7 boxes. And there is a small chance that they are still in the dark pink pieces. I will continue with those shortly so IF they are there I will find them quickly if not ... eventually they will show up.