John's Green Blog

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Category: reviews

  • Huichol Yarn Painting

    Huichol Yarn Painting

    a Pomegranate puzzle: 1000 pieces, 25 x 80

    The artwork is yarn inlaid into beeswax on a wooden board.
    It’s title is:
    “Gods Teach Humans to Honor the Sacred Seeds“

    Just to be pedantic:
    If you’re pressing yarn into beeswax, is it called “painting”?

    Whatever you call it, yarn laid into beeswax looks effing hard to do, and looks great!

    The puzzle box has some cool text on it:

    • When the Universe was created the Supreme Beings were shape-shifters.
      They could transform themselves into humans, plants, animals, and insects      .
    • Dove Woman could shift into a dove, a human, or the Corn Mother.
      She and her daughters provided abundance      :
      • Blue Corn Girl
      • Amaranth Girl
      • Squash Girl
      • Bean Girl
      • Gourd Girl
    • When the Creators thought it was time for the shape-shifters to take a form, they invented human, Watakame.
      • Watakame taught humans how to plant corn and honor the precious seeds.
      • The rituals he taught to these gods bring sustenance to the Peopleto this day:
        • Father Sun
        • Rain Mothers
        • Brother Deer
        • Corn Mother

    I got a little emotional just writing that, because those are such beautiful images, and with a little imagination you can see ’em all in the painting!

    Doing the easy parts

    Ongoing from the start was making a separate pile of the pieces at the top and bottom:

    • the solid purple pieces – happily there’s only one row of these at top and bottom, so they all have an edge.
    • the turquoise pieces with stripes.
      This band is three pieces wide, top and bottom:
      • outer row has purple on it’s outer half and turquoise with a bit of yellow strip on the other half
      • middle row is turquoise, with the other part of the yellow strip on one side and a bit of a red stripe on the other
      • inner row has the rest of the red stripe and some of the actual image!

    The puzzle is broadly symmetrical, with some extremely use differences in the details which I will describe below.

    individual pieces are gorgeous!
    upper left deer (with raindrops 🙂 and upper middle Corn Goddess
    upper right deer and some of the ‘corn circle” filled in
    beautiful water scene at the bottom, and the central mandala

    Here are the parts that “jumped out at me”, more of less in the order that I got to them:

    • top right – big smiling sun and a big deer with **brown spots
    • top left – big cloud and a big deer with **white spots
      • **raindrops from the big cloud made the red background go quicker on the left side
    • The lovely blue color of the water area at the bottom middle
    • The deep blue surround and the circle of fire jumped out
      • the interior of the mandala was really fun:
        • the eight-way symmetry
        • the beautiful blue color: different from the water blue at the bottom so is was easy to distinguish the pieces
        • the eight gorgeous little white tadpole creatures
        • the green and yellow men

    That was it for the easy stuff. Next up:

    • Those beings at the bottom, whatever they are, because that area is closest to my chair!
      • I’m guessing they are the “First Beings” still in shape-shifter mode, in other words proto-humans.
    • Next was the Corn Goddess at the top middle. This pieces are pretty distinct, and it;s another beautiful image.
    • that brown area in the lower middle left is cool, where these proto-humans are gestated

    Now it’s time to tackle that big green circle that encloses everything.

    • I think the green is cornstalks
    • **Note that the left side has a blue stripe through it, and the right side has a red stripe through it. Makes it easier to match ’em up.
    • On the red (right) side:
      • **the bottom half has little flowers between the leaves, and the flowers change color as you got around the circle.
      • **when the flowers stop, the rest of the leaves have stylized corn silk in changing colors
    • On the blue (left) side:
      • **the leaves have stylized corn silk in changing colors for the whole side, on the outside AND inside!
    • Did the red side first, then the green side. It was pretty fun.
    • In the course of doing this I’ve done most of the red background.
      • There’s still 20-odd pieces left which are pretty easy to place.
    • Recall above I mentioned the solid purple and the turquoise rows that span the width of the puzzle.
      • Since I’ve finished the red background, it seems logical to do the last of those rows, the most inside one, because it’s half red background!
      • Turned out to be fun and pretty easy.
    • I decided to roll on with the special pieces and for the bottom (closest to my chair 🙂 to do the next row – turquoise with yellow and pink stripes.
    • That used up exactly half of those pieces, so I rotated the puzzle 90 degrees to to the top!
    • The top rows went pretty quickly, now we’re down to finishing the middle!

    This is what the puzzle looks like with everything except all the complicated folks in the middle done!

    Even doing the puzzle is oddly spiritual. The poses of the people, the little creatures along the bottom, stylized feather arrangements that some of the important figures are wearing … it’s all kind of moving.

    This last part also takes a helluva long time!

    Each of those pieces has a story to tell:

    • a fragment of one of those lovely skirts, and a piece of a dude’s foot
    • there’s the dudes bending over, and
    • the dudes standing up, abd the ladies carrying …offerings?
      • all with a distinctive way of holding their hands in from of them.

    Anyway each piece requires studying it and finding it on the picture, and seeing if there is a neighboring piece to attach it to. It dowsn’t go quickly.

  • Canyonlands puzzle

    Canyonlands puzzle

    If you’re been paying attention to my puzzle saga, the Edward Gorey puzzle was the last one in my large collection of puzzles!

    Well, I finished ole Edward Gorely last week, and now I’m hankering to start a new puzzle.

    I did NOT go out and buy a new puzzle, so that means I looking into my stacks for a previously done puzzle!

    this one is the first one I have chosen to re-do since I moved to Cogir.!

    The one I chose is the top one in the left-hand column of boxes in the picture above. Maybe the fact that it was at the top of the stack influienced my decision… who’s to say 🙂 When I am finished, I will clear out a corner of my other closet and place this box there and start the stack of puzzles of I’ve re-done!

    This Puzzle

    My last few puzzles have been classic rectangular grid puzzles. Those puzzles don’t say “about 1000 pieces“, they are exactly 1000 pieces, because they are 25 rows of pieces, with 80 pieces in each row, and that is 25*80 = 1000!!

    This one is billed as “over 500 pieces”. The pieces are NOT on a grid, rather they are all kinds of goofy shapes, which makes it more fun in come ways.

    I found it online, at the Canyonlands Natural History Association website!

    I love the colors and the visually interesting composition:

    • The brightest area is usually the sky at the top or the water at the bottom, but here is is the patch of sky in the middle, peeking out from under the incredible natural arch.
    • The red sandstone on the underside of the arch is sheltered and relatively smooth, and it veritably glows in the direct sunlight!
    • The camera is in the shade of the arch, so we get just a stunning interplay of light and colors.

    I’ve finished all the colorful parts.

    What I am loving the most right now is just the irregularly shaped pieces. They really do make for a more interesting puzzle experience than the usual rectangular grid!

    Gettin there!

    So all these gray and brown pieces are really pretty hard to put together, but today right before lunch I had a little breakthrough: I noticed that the little bits of cliff side in the left half-middle are distinct because there’s bit f sagebrush visible.

    That somehow made it possible to fill the whole left middle of the puzzle.
    I was quite pleased!

    The rest of this puzzle sure is going slow!

    It took about five days to finish off the last bits of the puzzle pictured above. But finish it I did earlier tonight! 🙂

    Now I get to pick another out of my pile!

  • National Parks collage

    National Parks collage

    I love National Parks and I love Deco style – these cool Deco typefaces and the graphic style of Deco poster art!

    I know I like this stuff but I’m not even sure I’m calling it be the right name … is is Deco?

    The images

    The eight posters left to right, top to bottom are:

    1. Yellowstone National Park
    2. Lassen National Park
    3. See America – Arches National Monument
    4. National Parks Preserve Wildlife
    5. See America – Welcome to Montana
    6. Grand Canyon National Park
    7. Zion National Park
    8. See America – Carlsbad Caverns National Park

    They are all 1930’s vintage.

    The ones that I find the most striking are Posters 1, 2, 6, 7.

    All four of my faves are all for the “Ranger Naturalist Service“, and they all use that deco font that I love so much!

    “The Ranger Naturalist Service refers to the historical educational branch of the National Park Service established in the 1920s.”

    The overall effort was the See America campaign! From the Share America website:

    “The See America campaign was developed by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era agency that put unemployed people to work and, with this project, also encouraged tourism. There were 14 original designs for the posters”

    The designs and colors in all of the panels are really quite striking.

    OMG!!! Here’s to you Google!

    I googled “typeface of National Park posters“, which is a pretty weak question, but it was good enough to produce the answer!

    A modern company is selling a rendition of that font and calling John Muir Sans!

    They are from “the WPA Era”.

    Only 14 original silk-screen national park poster designs were produced during the WPA era between 1938 and 1941.

    1. Coronado National MemorialThe puzzle
    2. Grand Teton
    3. Grand Canyon
    4. Yosemite
    5. Yellowstone Old Faithful
    6. Yellowstone Falls
    7. Glacier
    8. Mount Rainier
    9. Zion
    10. Crater Lake
    11. Lassen Volcanic
    12. Wind Cave
    13. Great Smoky Mountains
    14. Boulder Dam (Lake Mead)

    Anyway, this puzzle has a variety of cool colors, and some very cool fonts. It is set up in eight distinct panels, so the cool orange color that may have caught your eye right off, is probably only occurs in a single one of those eight panels! I’m guessing that this puzzle is gonna go pretty easily….

    Love those colors, love that font!!
    Love the colors. Love the cowboy vignette!
    Love that 30’s hiking gear!
    • The VERY first thing to catch MY eye is the green on green text of the Zion panel.
      • Whoever set up the typefaces here this went hog-wild on the word “ZION”!
    • Second was the black on mauve text of the Grand Canyon panel
      • and the black on darker mauve text at the bottom of the Lassen panel
      • and the yellow on brown text at the top of the Lassen panel.
        A lot going on in the Lassen panel! 🙂
      • and the gray on black text at the bottom of the Yellowstone panel.
    • Those panels are the “30’s Deco style” ones that I’m so crazy for!

    Then I started laying out and it went pretty quick!

    I am 3/4 the way done.

    • 1,2 totally done!
      • 1 – loved all that blue and white, and the wonderful deco lettering
      • 2 – loved that rasberry color and the strange yellow sky,and the cool deco lettering
        • There has been no active eruption such as the artist depicts in human memory!
    • 7,8 almost totally done – just missing 1 and 2 pieces respectively
      • 8 – All those deep, dark blues with a little splashes of white were really fun.
        • “See America” is a pretty boring font.
      • 7 – This one was really fun!
        • I love the actual formation in the image, and I love the deco-ish way the rock faces are depicted .
    • 3,4,5,6 all need some work!
      • 4 – is the best pice of graphic deign in the page.
        • The deep red sunset shading into lighter orange beneath
        • The artful-ness of the two sheep against the sunset, their lifelike postures …
      • 3- the one next to it, the See America one with the holes in the rocks was also fun
        • The deep, dark reds and the lighter reds were fun.
        • I like how the gray tree-color sets off the reds.
      • 5 – This one is pretty simple a little boring, just black and white.
      • 6 – This one turns out to be the absolute hardest panel by far!
        • All those grays and rasberry’s are so noisy! It’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on!

    That rasberry color is kind of a unifying theme for the puzzle!

    • the light raspberry background to the text in panel 6
    • the darker rasberry background to the text in panel 2 color
    • that color is also echoed in the lighter red-browns in panel 3

  • Edward Gorey poster

    Edward Gorey poster

    The title is a little off, because this puzzle it not named! It is a poster that Gorey made for a Broadway production of Dracula. So it is not a named art work and has no title per se.

    • In their wisdom, the good folks at Pomegranate decided it would make a good puzzle anyway.
    • And they were right!

    This was the VERY LAST puzzle on my puzzle storage shelf. I even chose to do the gloomy and difficult Ninth of November before this one. It just didn’t look very exciting on the shelf.

    Shows what I know. Now that I’m doing it, it’s super-fun!

    • The first thing to go after was the bright colors – the reds and the bright greens and blues.
    • Doing the Ninth of November I tried something that I’m trying again here:
      • Sort out the pieces you know you aren’t gonna need until much later and set them aside, … so you’re shuffling through that many less pieces.
      • In this case it’s the solid black pieces.
        • Black pieces with color and a straight edge are the left and right sides and the bottom.
        • Black pieces with color and a curved edge are the arched top.
        • Black pieces with that yellow color in a straight edge are the bottom.
    • Then I waded into the colored stuff, which was super fun.
      • The big green panel in the middle was calling to me.
    • The cute little critters and their puzzled faced are very, very fun!
    • The little blue rats are a pretty funny because there are so many of them abd they turn up in silly places! 🙂
    • Gorey’s a pretty silly guy it turns out! (I mean that in a good way!)
    Reds and blues and that neon green!
    The big picture.
    Gettin the lady in the blue gown together.
    Got the green panel in the middle together!

    Sunday was puzzle day!

    Good thing I have a big table!

    Sunday morning I put everything in place: the edges on the sides and the major blocks I’ve assembled where they should go:

    • notice the pile of solid black piecess in the far corner
    • next to them is a pile of plain yellow-ish pieces that are the wooden floor.
      • there are a ton of floor pieces with bits of animal tail or dancing goblin or whatever that I am stoked to have around.
    • I was happy to get some of the black arch edges hooked up in the upper left!

    This puzzle is really engaging! I’ve done all this since late Thursday night (3.5 days). That’s a lot of puzzle pieces!

    • Another nice Gorey touch is those creeping vines (grapevines!) winding up the inner columns on the side panels.
    • Notice that outside those columns is a column of bricks.
      • Noticie further that the bricks are quite a bit wider on the left side than on the right. We call this a clue! 🙂
    • Then there’s another set of columns, then this weird pink stuff.
    • Tonight I’m gonna wade into the floor pieces.
      • The characters, the dancers and the happy dog, are cool, but as long as I’m here, might as well finish off all those floor pieces.
      • Reversing the logic from above, floor pieces are a thing onto themselves.

    Filling in the edges and the bottom

    Fun stuff is done, now gotta finish the boring stuff

    • Finished the floor, so pretty much everything interesting in this puzzle is finished! But I’m a guy who finishes what he started!
    • I have sorted out:
      • black edge pieces with other stuff on them at the top
      • plain black straight edge pieces for the top and botton
      • plain black non-edge pieces, I’m guessing there will be exactly two rows of these one at the top and (maybe?) one on the bottom. And also a few more on top.
      • Almost everything else is gold tassles, and the top of curtains done as beige line drawings.
        • Refer to the title document for a good image of the whole puzzle.
      • Oh and those two silly cats stretching in the curtains on the upper left and right. 🙂
    • Before I’m completely done I want to say again how much FUN I’ve had on this puzzle. The people and critters that Edward Gorey draws are so darned charming!
    • I’ll pick up a piece with 2/3 of a face on it and just start laughing at how goofy the face looks. 🙂

    Got that arch lined up!

    Nothing left but the black. Those cats sure are cute!

    gold tassles and cat
    gold tassles and other cat

    The note that came with the puzzle said there were exactly two pieces missing, and in the end there were still only two missing!

    I’m always delighted when I finish a puzzle and there are no newly missing pieces!

    They were both black edge pieces, and they EXACTLY the 4th piece from the top corner on both sides! I’ll bet there’s a story there!

  • The Ninth of November, 1888

    The Ninth of November, 1888

    “The Lord Mayor’s Show” Painting by William Logsdall

    “This picture shows the procession of Sir James Whitehead, Lord Mayor of London on the Ninth of November 1887. The artist … was impressed by the scene of pomp ceremony.
    He … took on the task of painting the scene using models and friends to pose.”

    Factiods from the internet:

    • Logsdall was given much assistance by the City of London.
    • The Corporation Mace was made available to him.
    • The coachman and footmen went in their liveries to his studio in Primrose Hill to pose for him.
    • Exhibited in 1890 at the Royal Academy.
    • Logsdall took 2½ years to paint this, at a cost of £500.
    • He refused an offer of £800 for it.
    • Exhibited in America where it won a medal!
    • Eventually sold to Sir James Whitehead, who promised to give it to the Guildhall but then decided to keep!
      • His son eventually did give it to them.
    • It now hangs at the Guildhall!

    First thoughts

    No Pieces Missing!!

    Sad to say this did not feel like a very high quality puzzle. Unlike a Pomegranate puzzle I would not go out of my way to get a Falcon Deluxe puzzle! The colors are muddy and “need better light”, even in very good light … sigh…

    That said, the fact that no pieces are missing counts for a lot!

    The colors in internet renderings of the painting are MUCH sharper than this puzzle.

    The puzzle review

    My take on the puzzle:

    • The first thing I’m drawn to is the colors:
      • First the reds jump out at you.
      • The gold also, but at first viewing the areas with gold are too busy to get a handle on.
      • The white breeches, and the different degrees of white.
        • The horseman’s breeches are VERY white!
        • The staff guy’s pants are more of a cream.
        • Also the black guy on the edge has a white outfit that has seen a lot of wear.
    • The first part of the puzzle I actually did was the middle third of the bottom half. 🙂
      • The big faces, the three guys in front, and the horseman then the carriages.
      • That took care of the red except for those two bits in the crowd.
    • Then I worked on the rest of the bottom half
      • Picking out puzzle pieces with faces and trying to find that face in the picture.
    • Then the funnest part was the layer of black peppered with faces on both sides.
    • After that it’s just a matter of putting in the work to do:
      • the flagstones on the bottom
      • the clouds on the top
      • and the gray, shadow-y buildings in the middle.

    First part:

    First things done
    Still a lot to go!
    That fellow in red by the lamppost!
    Love the old dude between marchers!
    The breeches and shoes are next!

    Sunday was for filling in the gold coaches and the horses and starting the pavement.

    You can tell the artist really got into painting this. There is the same expressive hand gesture like 4 different places.

    This guy is interesting
    The last bits of red
    Bottom middle done-ish

    I’ll bet Logsdall was exhausted at the end of a long day composing and placing all these little expressive faces!

    These faces are SO cool!

    Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday: finish the pavement and black areas:

    It was longer and harder than I thought it would be. This is where the puzzle piece similarity problem above was a real issue! If you’re doing faces or red and gold uniforms, the fact that two pieces are of a similar shape is not a problem because the patterns are so distinct. But now doing the wet pavement (or sky next week), 10-20 pieces look very similar. I spent a fair amount of time in the last three days looking for specific shapes that did NOT exist(!) because I had placed a piece next to it in error!

    Finished the fun part, now do the top

    A week later, I have finished off the flagstones, so the bottom part of the puzzle is totally done! All the working area is at the top, so I’ve rotated the puzzle!

    It’s a little disorienting at first, the shy is at the bottom, but it’s all shades of white clouds and shades of abstract gray building shapes. so it’s pretty easy to get past tje upside-downness. 🙂

    Three Days later…

    The sky and buildings part is going really slowly….

    I’m gonna shake it up a little bit and start working on the white part instead of the gray parts!

    Sky is at the bottom! It’s all white and shades of gray!
    Oddly, these gray triangle pieces are the first I found.

    Suddenly it gets easier!

    I ended up dividing the top 40% of the puzzle into three parts:

    • The side of the parade in shadow
      • left side of the painting, right when it’s upside down
      • heavy on gray mixed with greens and yellows
    • The side of the parade in sunlight
      • right side of the painting, left when it’s upside down
      • heavy on gray mixed with blues and whites
    • The sky in the middle.

    Bad puzzle piece shapes!

    This was even more work and more mind bending than the Rivera puzzle I just finished. The two puzzle were similar in that each had a bunch of little faces staring back at you, so you spend chunks of time examining each little face and placing them one by one. Way different from National Park scenery, or even most fine art paintings!

  • Detroit Industy – Diego Rivera

    Detroit Industy – Diego Rivera

    I thought this was going to be a simple report on a jigsaw puzzle.
    But apparently if Diego Rivera is involved there will be politics!

    The colors in the digital file are quite a bit more saturated and lively than the colors in the actual puzzle sad to say.

    I was able to run down this image of the puzzle off an eBay ad.

    The puzzle no longer in the Pomegranate catalog. None of the puzzles I look for ever seem to my active in the catalog! Pomegranate is always making new puzzles so I guess it too hard to keep everything in stock.

    I bought this at a museum bookstore somewhere back in the misty past.

    This mural is part of the Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933).

    “A series of frescoes, consisting of twenty-seven panels depicting industry at the Ford Motor Company and in Detroit.” (Wikipedia)

    The two frescoes that are considered major works are those on the North and South Walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

    Our jigsaw puzzle is the work on the North Wall!

    Doing the puzzle!

    The first thing that catches ones eye of course is the orange FIRE! It’s the only real color in this unsaturated puzzle. There are other nice oranges. The tee shirt on the fellow on the lower left really stands out. The steel beams in the ceiling are a brighter orange in the puzzle pieces than they appear in the images.

    The only other things that stands out are the two big white-ish metal tanks that are the main visual element here. The right-hand tank has interesting orange-ish areas (the metal reflecting off the central fire) that turned out to be pretty easy to assemble.

    The white tanks turned out to be easy to find, but difficult to assemble!

    When in doubt, start on the edges, right?

    The two bottom corners had a “money green” color that was pretty distinct for this puzzle. As you see in the picture below I quickly picked out those green columns from that 1000 piece pile!

    That vertical bar on the left side is distinctive.
    Other than that the edges are kinda gray and un-distinctive.

    The coolest thing about the puzzle are the little bits of workers faces. All the guys along the lower row of course, but the dudes in the upper right, bathed in the glow of molten metal are really cool

    A couple of days later

    I spent a lot time on it last night.

    • I’m very pleased to get the orange tee shirt guy attached to the edge.
    • I extended the right side orange section.
    • The smooth white areas are harder to assemble than I thought.
      • There are subtle color involved, orange-white, blue-white, even green-white. They are pretty, but hard to assemble!
    • I got the workers’ big flat feet (shoes, actually) along the bottom!
    • I got one piece to connect the fiery furnace area to the right hand big steel tower. Cool!
    • The orange-shirted worker in the lower right came together. Look back at yesterday’s pic. I had the overall straps assembled, but was lacking the one piece that connects the straps to the brown arm in the edge pieces.

    Gallery!

    New software! I installed the Modula gallery plug-in.
    This is my first gallery.

    Seems really cool.

    Note that between the third image and the last one I put the granny-glasses guy right next to the other guys, and found their faces!

    I’m loving the details of the very hard working workers. The orange shirt/coveralls guy. The hats and the shoes.

    I guess working class 1930s guys really did wear their fedoras all day every day, just like on the movies!

    I’ll bet this painting took forever to do, and I’ll bet Rivera was utterly worn out by doing it.

    Look at the details of hands and faces in individual puzzle pieces, then think of having to dab your palette 3-4 time just to get the skin and background colorsfor one piece of a 1000 piece puzzle is exhausting to think about.

    Or course you give yourself a break with the expanses of white cooling towers (or whatever they are). But even there h can’thelp himself from being artistic – just plain white in the middle, white with green to the left, white trending sharply into red/orange overtones to the right towards the actual fires!

    The tiny details and managing the palette for the metal things, the cloth things.

    Finally finished!

    When I finished last time, I carefully notated on the inside of the box that there were two pieces missing, and their locations.

    I am very happy to report that when the dust cleared this time there were STILL only two pieces missing. I am so slovenly here at Cogir that I was sure there would be more!

  • Tower of Babel jigsaw puzzle

    Tower of Babel jigsaw puzzle

    The Bedford Hours: the Tower of Babel, from the Bed Master’s Studio
    (circa 1423 – Pomegranite – 1000 pieces)

    How long ago did I get this puzzle? I think I bought it “used” 🙂 It’s pretty worn out and there’s more pieces missing that usual for me. So I’m gonna guess I got it in the ’00’s at the Mt Carmel Shop on Lovell Ave in Mill Valley. Going to that store was a regular part of my post-coffee rotation. Gosh that was a nice life!

    I love the early Middle Ages style of tapestry.
    I have so many questions and thoughts:

    I am going to cross-link this to the puzzle I’m doing now. It’s got it’s own take on protelariat style 600 years later!

    • Why is a very stylish 21th-century orange such a popular color for homespun? It’s still that was centuries later in this puzzle linked above!
    • Hoodies came before hats! :))
      • This is kind of obvious I guess. But this scene reminds us that it was kind of a class thing back then. Even a peasant could design a cloak with an extra flap in the back to pull over your head. You had to be a little fancy to carry around an extra piece of clothing just to cover your head.
    • Class-conscious clothing
      • The worker dudes (and they are all dudes, nary a non-dude person anywhere to be found) all wear leggings and tie-up booties… They don’t call it “homespun” for nothing!
      • …while the rich dudes have nice fitted shoes and cuffs on their pants and some pretty sweet needlework. I am speaking mostly of that crew in the lower left corner who are pretty clearly the Bishop and his traveling party.
    • Only dress exception I see is the stonemason in the bottom middle (green shirt, orange headgear) He’s sporting those silver booties like he’s ready for the disco. Stonemasons had a marketable skill so they were further up the status scale.
    • The camel getting loaded up is pretty cool.
      Even though the scenery and people look European, it’s a reminder that we’re supposed to be in Iraq somewhere.
    • On the right middle there’s a couple of heads and an orange hat, but no clue what their message is … not true, on further review I think they are the Magi – I know I’m mixing Old and New Testaments, but … artistic license and all. 🙂
    • I love that everybody needs a shave! Even the fancy Bishops or whatever they are in the left bottom are pretty ratty. 🙂
    • So, from bottom to top, we have:
      • the Bosses on the bottom left Church people and money people
      • Skilled professionals on the bottom middle. The skill required to cut a block so that it fits perfectly after you carry it up four flights of stairs is quite remarkable!
      • Less skilled professionals on either side of the lower part of the tower. Running the winch, mixing the cement, carrying it all from here to there.
      • From the middle down there is a swarm of activity, but from the middle up activity on the sides fades to nothing to focus on the existential drama on the Tower.
      • Up to 2/3 up the Tower it’s still pretty normal, carrying morter, organizing the block and tackle to get stones up to their lever …
      • … but on the tier 4/5 up the picture (the top tier), the last visible tier, all heck is breaking loose!
      • It’s gotten downright primitive at the top. The wages of hubris and all that! 🙂
      • I’m gonna guess that the buildings on the left about 70% up are the “shining city on the hill”. That odd little figure on the middle tower who prefigures all the crazy s–t upstairs is staring at it (I think 🙂

    Looking it up in the internet I am reminded that Pomegranate makes very high quality puzzles. I have a bunch of them in my stack of puzzles in my closet!

    Also is appears that this puzzle is no longer in their active catalog!

  • Puzzles

    Puzzles reviews so far:

    Me talking again

    • 40 pieces x 25 pieces = 40*25 == 1000 pieces!!!!
    • Every inner piece has 4 sides.
    • top/bottom/sides have 3 sides (except for corners)
      • not counting the top/bottom/sides there are 38 x 23 x 4 edges.
      • top/bottom: 38 x 3 x 2
      • sides: 23 x 3 x 2
      • corners: 4 x 2

    I finished these puzzles pretty recently before my documentation obsession.

    Billboard

    500-ish pieces – art by Grace Hartigan.

    My absolute favorite puzzle that I possess! Much as I love the Pomogranite, they all do have the square piece grid. (which I overanalyze above:)

    Both the colors and the shapes of the pieces are very stimulating!

    Hebrew thing

    1000 pieces

    “It was as if the universe was telling me to do this puzzle!”

    Alternative story: I happened to see it laying on top of the pile on the back of Chad’s truck and and he fished it out and let me keep it.

    Either version is fine, it’s a really fun puzzle in any event.

    Grand Staircase/Escalante

    500 pieces, roughly 13 by 38, 12″ by 36″, irregular pieces

    Most of the western National Parks have a few of these long, skinny puzzles. Makes sense, right? The attraction of the park is these amazing scenic panoramas that stretch from one sode of the sky to the other, so why not make a few buckson the gift shop with puzzles that try to capture that panaromic feel!

    Long and skinny! I’m a big fan of irregular pieces, so much more interesting! A lot of the western National Parks sell these long, skinny puzzles, since it’s an obvious way to accenuate the scope of the western landsape. This one is one of my faves!

    The colors are just so gorgeous!