Mom and I have finally gotten back to work on the Mystery Puzzle! And although we found and assembled quite a few pieces in the last few days there’s one piece in particular that made us both VERY happy – we found the one we needed to complete the top edge of the puzzle!!

We only needed one, thin, tiny little piece to complete the top edge. Yay! I can report that the this edge measures almost 30 inches across, but we still have no idea how tall it’s going to be. Since it’s obviously a building, and the color line cutting makes for many straight edges that go on the inside of the puzzle, we aren’t really even attempting to assemble the edges.

We’re finding (or trying to find) significantly interestingly shaped pieces and working outwards. Although you can see from the pictures that many of them are significantly interesting, so it isn’t as easy as we’d hoped. 😉

Most of the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of days is in small chunks of pieces that are on trays and scattered all over the board. I didn’t take pictures of them because I was too excited about sharing the progress of finding that one teeny piece. Still, every piece we find that connects to something is a triumph; and we’re continuing to revel in the fun of the mystery, the crazy wonderful pieces, and the time spent together. 💗😍💗

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. ☺

 

Sorry it’s taken so long to get today’s post published, but there’s exciting news to share! This morning mom came over and we put together the rest of the light colored section! *insert hilarious old lady happy dancing here*👵💃👵

She’s still here and we’re still working on it, but it’s definitely the sky portion of the image. Normally I would wait to post a picture from the entire day’s progress, but this is too exciting not to share!

You can see the symmetry in the image, and that there’s definitely going to be a building there! In fact, after I took this picture, mom found a couple of the pieces of the building that fit into what we have assembled so far. 😮 I wasn’t kidding about the color line cutting – a couple of the pieces that I pulled when we first started to show you that they cut along the outline of the building actually fit into our sky section!

These two pieces have NO light colored area on them at all, and fit perfectly into what we’ve already done! Devious!

The entire box seems to be only one puzzle, and there are MANY MANY MORE pieces left. We’re kind of at a loss of where to go from here. I almost want to go through the remaining pieces and sort again to see if we can find the pieces we’ve obviously missed, but that may not be the best use of our time.

Also, I’m very excited to have found a piece that has wording stamped into it, “Publishing Co.” is legible if you hold it at the right angle, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to find out what company made this puzzle! Two of the pieces have the word “Parker” written on the back of them, so it may be one of Parker’s “Pastime” puzzles from the early 1900’s. There’s so much mystery in our little mystery box!

We’re still deciding at the moment what comes next, but she’s so excited that she’s definitely going to be here for a while figuring out our strategy and hoping putting in lots of pieces!

Many people have asked if this puzzle is all one color, so I’ve tried to get a picture that shows clearly the shades and streaks. I did the best I could with my cellphone camera, but had to adjust the contrast, light, and clarity so that the differences were clear. Even with my lack of photographic skills I think you can see above that it isn’t all just flat color.

The color line cutting can make things tricky, they made cuts directly along the lines of color separation to keep you guessing – and it works! From the look of the assembled sections so far we believe that this large lightly colored area is perhaps the sky portion of a much larger image. Of course we won’t know for sure until it’s finished, but it’s definitely keeping us guessing. 🙂

The mystery of this puzzle and the fun of sitting in front of it and searching for connections has kept me occupied this past week, and I’ve been neglecting all other puzzling. I haven’t finished any puzzles in more than 7 days now! 😱