It’s looking pretty good, right? We put all the rest of the pieces on trays, filled in all the holes we had, and started working on the actual image. We assembled some smaller roof sections (not shown), and started working on the symmetrical pieces, trying to find the interesting shapes that fit into and around them, like the ones below.

It’s not as easy as you might think to find the right pieces; back in the days of hand cut wooden puzzles they did their very best to make things as challenging as possible. Many times what fits insides these spaces are two pieces cut so that it almost obscures the shape you think you’re looking for. Talk about focusing the mind! You’ve got to have pretty intense concentration when you’re working on this puzzle! (That’s part of the fun for us though, we’re loving it 💞) There are about 35 or 40 more symmetrical pieces in this sort of style, but they all look very different! For a black and white photograph like the one we’re working on it seems the easiest place to start.

We also found 3 American flags that have the hand coloring (painting) on them, they really stood out!

I can’t say for certain, but to me it looks as if they were painted directly onto the puzzle. It’s so interesting! When we first saw it, I thought some idiot had marked up one of the pieces with an ink pen. Thank goodness that wasn’t the case. 😉

We took good pictures of the sky before we started adding pieces, because we want to get a piece count. We we smarter this time and counted the pieces as we were putting them on trays, but we’ve got to go back and count the ones we’ve already assembled. They won’t be easy to count, so I think it’ll work best to print pictures of the sections so we can mark them as we’re counting and don’t lose track.

I’m guessing the total is going to be around 1500 pieces. We had 1125 on trays, plus the sky sections. I’m surprised by that number though, I thought it would have been more. Perhaps it’s because many of the pieces are quite large, especially the symmetrical ones; it seems as though it should be much more than 1500 pieces. It’s a big one!

We’re having a blast with this project, and I hope you’re enjoying reading about it and seeing the pictures too. ☺