It’s been close to nine months since I put the last piece into place on the 24,000 piece Life: The Great Challenge puzzle, and tonight I FINALLY moved it off the table and took pictures of it mostly assembled. I have not connected the sections yet as the final section is very weak from a bad puzzle sheets experience I had. The kids and I had to re-work about 25 pieces tonight that had come loose from the backing. I…
Derek and I are now “famous” with all five of my Facebook puzzle groups after posting this video of our mixing of Educa’s Around the World 42,000 piece puzzle. Even though he was sick at the time, he had a good time helping out with the puzzle project. In fact, my all-time favorite moment came at the end after the video was over. I asked Derek to carefully re-check each bag to make sure no pieces got stuck inside a…
Today I went out and bought most of the materials I anticipate needing in order to assemble this puzzle. Here’s what I got: 1. Forty-two 20 x 30″ foam boards — I anticipate I will need a few more since each board holds a little less than 1,000 pieces, but this will be plenty to get me started for sure. ? 2. Three packages of thin foam sheets ( each package contains 12 sheets). I love these for laying out…
I am thrilled to announce that on February 2, 2019 at 11:40 p.m. I happily placed the final piece into my glorious 24,000 piece Life puzzle. My life is now complete! ??? Wow, what an incredible ride this has been! For more than 8.5 years I have been dutifully working on this big, beautiful beast of a puzzle. I have thoroughly enjoyed every moment I have spent working on it. I never once thought I would give up, or that…
As I stated yesterday, here are the pictures and a description of my process in flipping Section 1 over on my main puzzling board so that contact paper can be attached to the back. STEP 1: Take a picture of the completed puzzle section – just in case you never see it this way again! LOL (Just kidding!!!) STEP 2: Carefully decide where you are going to make your cut. I wanted to use the repeat pattern borders as my…
I know I haven’t updated this in a little while, but it is because I have been playing around with some different ideas on how best to approach doing Section 2 with Section 1 still on my main puzzling board. I didn’t want to get too deep into Section 2 until I got this figured out. I have changed my strategy a couple of times, but I think I have finally found what is going to work the best…thanks to…
I was able to work on the puzzle for a couple of hours last night which was great. In that time, I was able to knock out the borders (top and bottom) and start on the tiger. The first two pieces of Section 2 are officially “married”. Here’s a picture of all the border pieces laid out and separated by whether they were a top or a bottom border piece. I was initially missing two of the top border pieces,…
Even though it’s been almost 3 years since I last sorted 6,000 jigsaw pieces, it feels like only yesterday. LOL Amazingly enough, I am separating the pieces into much more detailed containers, yet it feels like it hasn’t taken me as long to sort through this section as it did the first one. I guess because I am way more familiar with the pieces and some of the more subtle textures, I am more quickly and easily able to identify which…
I am elated to announce that SECTION 1 IS DONE!!!! I can’t believe it took me this long to finish the first section, but I am so proud of myself for sticking to my committment of getting this puzzle put together. I am now officially 25% done! Doesn’t seem like much in the overall scheme of things, but for me, it’s a pretty huge accomplishment since I’ve never completed any puzzle over 1500 pieces before this. It has been an…
I am about 100 or so pieces away from being done with Section 1! I can hardly believe it. I know I should be making a huge push to get those last 100 pieces finished, but boy have they been difficult. I’m down to the pieces that are between the water line and the start of the clownfish and it all looks the same, and it’s all bluish…so there’s not even much color variation to help me out on this…