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. 💗😍💗

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. ☺