This one, in fact. (Click on the picture for a slightly larger picture.) Took just under a month. Finished, it’s a foot shorter and a few inches wider than a twin mattress.
The same company also makes 9,000 and, Og help us, 18,000 piece puzzles. I don’t even want to think about it right now.
(I saw a couple paintings by the same artist, Giovanni Paolo Panini, in the Louvre, and really liked them. Information on him has been a bit hard to dig up, but there are apparently four very similar paintings, with the paintings-within-the-painting from different eras of Rome. All his works I’ve been able to find have the same strong use of perspective, although there’s an interesting perspective error in this one. You never truly know a work of art until you’ve spent a month staring at it in little pieces. I wouldn’t mind finding out more about him. Any Panini experts in the house?)
I don’t have any preserver, or any place to really hang it at the moment. And I’ve always thought that doing that was sort of the worst of both worlds (all the seams between the pieces detract from the art, but it isn’t a puzzle anymore, either.)
But then I don’t know if I’ll ever put it together again. The first time was to prove I could do it, and now I’ve done that.
Well done! You did it all yourself? I do believe I would die were I to attempt that.
I was going to come in here and suggest you get started on an 18,000-piece puzzle, but I see you’ve already considered (and wisely rejected) that idea.
I don’t know, maybe someday I’ll tackle the 18,000. I like the picture, it’s a collection of four very old maps of the world. I’m not wild about puzzles where it’s some castle or landscape, and the details go pretty quickly and then I go crazy trying to finish all the identical blue sky. The map one looks like it would have enough details to be interesting.
And even if I weren’t puzzled out at the moment, I don’t even have room to attempt it right now. It’s one thing to give the finished dimensions, but the sprawl when you’re working on it is another thing. I’d want to build some kind of rolling platform that would span the puzzle, so I could put pieces in the middle without having to walk on it.
I did this puzzle on the wood floor in the bedroom of my new apartment. It’s easy to put in the effort when the only things in the place are mattress, sleeping bag, pillow and jigsaw puzzle, and the rest of your stuff isn’t coming for two weeks.
Now that I think about it, I believe the 18,000 piece puzzle comes with the pieces separated into four bags, AFAIK one bag for each quadrant, not all mixed up. So you could do it in phases. Four times 4500 is a piece of cake once you’ve done 5000, right?
(I don’t mean to pester you; it’s just that my parents own a puzzle shop, and it’s fascinating that there are actually a few people who have the patience for these huge puzzles.)
I offer my congrats! I also ant to thank you for the link. I was a puzzle enthusiast in even my earliest memories. From when I was maybe five or six, I almost always had a jigsaw in progress (probably 500 pieces back then) on a board under my bed that I would slide out to work on every night. During my teen years, when I would have gotten into the really hard ones (3000-5000 pieces), I quit spending so much time doing puzzles. Now that I’ve graduated college, I really want to get back into it. Problem is, the largest I have (1500 pieces) aren’t enough of a challenge. I can do it in under a week if I get in some good time on the weekend.
So I’m looking for bigger puzzles, and I’m thinking about ordering something off the Ravensburger site. Any other good puzzle site recommendations? Thanks!
My parents’ puzzle store has a site selling things online, but since I have a stake in that I imagine it would be against the rules to advertise it here. For various reasons it may not be competitive in the area of large puzzles anyway (though they do have a lot of them). If you should want more information, it could be done by e-mail something; otherwise, if you or any other puzzle enthusiast is ever in the Dayton, Ohio area, you should stop by!
Not necessarily. I have lots of puzzles hanging all around the apartment, ranging from puzzles with 500 pieces to ones with 4000 pieces, all are framed and with non-reflecting glass and it’s really beautiful and so far all the guests liked it too.
It can get expensive though. Getting a frame and glass done can easily double or triple the puzzle price, and if it’s hanging in a strategic location, you’ll want non-reflecting glass which will cost even more.
My latest 4000 is hanging right in the middle of the living room. I bought it for 50$ and spent another 100$ on framing. It’s really pretty though.
I remember seeing something about that as well, but I consider it an act of craven puppyhood to not do it as a proper 18,000 piece puzzle. You got to dump all four bags into the box and mix them up or it doesn’t count.
You know how really great art museums will have one room where they hang the really big, impressive paintings? That’s where this one would be. And considering that I live in small apartment, if I were to frame this and hang it up, it would dominate that one room and other nearby buildings. Seriously, I think there’s only one wall in the place where this would even fit. And it doesn’t match anything else in my decor. The only thing it matches is the big impressive room in a really great museum.
And from looking at other paintings by the same artist, I think they may have cropped the top and bottom a little to get the right aspect ratio they wanted for the puzzle. Okay for a puzzle, I guess, but bothers my artistic integrity a little.
MtheF, I don’t know of any other good jigsaw puzzle links. I saw one of the paintings, then later I ran across a Ravensburger catalog in a store and there it was. Then I found the puzzle in the next store I checked.
So this explains why we haven’t had any Boston dopefests lately!
I’m a puzzle fiend. I usually glue them when I’m finished though, and pick up a cheap frame at Walmart, and display them. I’ve never battled anything larger than a thousand though…
