It’s been a month since mom and I starting working on The Challenge of 2019, and we’ve made excellent progress!

About 2 weeks in we’d finished the sky portion of the image, and we’ve been working on the symmetrical pieces for the last couple of weeks. All these clusters are the results of that progress. You can see on the right side all the little assembled pieces of buildings, that’s what we’re currently working on. There are many buildings in this image, but I think there will be one enormous building in the foreground when we’re done – the Municipal Building in New York City.

The color line cutting makes things very challenging, and you have to try to make your brain focus on the shapes only, because color and background are almost no help at all. You can see the many straight edges on some of the pieces we’ve already put together; where the building meets the roof – straight edge, where the roof meets something in the background – straight edge. It makes it almost impossible to assemble the edges of the puzzle first, but we’re loving it anyway❣

Every piece we find and connect feels like an enormous victory, and mom and I are constantly stopping the other so they can witness the connection. It sounds stupid to put in into words, but it’s an extremely complicated puzzle and the connections almost never look like what you think they will – we’re so proud when we find something!

We’ve also gotten a very large chunk of pieces connected to sky, and believe me there were many little old lady high fives all around! Connecting two pieces together is awesome, but connecting a large block of pieces to the sky made us so unbelievably happy – we both have P.A.D.S., and finding these connections made our entire day. 😉

We still don’t have a final piece count, but mom promises to print out the pictures today so I can start counting the sky pieces and get a grand total. (Why we didn’t think to count them first I honestly don’t know, probably because we didn’t know that the whole box was only one image) I’m hopeful that whenever I post next about this puzzle I’ll be able to give an accurate piece count, we’re thinking it’s going to be around 1500 pieces. It looks like it may be missing a piece or two, but that doesn’t matter much to us, we’re still having a fantastic time puzzling together and enjoying this amazing vintage wooden puzzle. 😎

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. 💗😍💗