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!