Jigsaw puzzles

Any fans? Have a favorite manufacturer? A favorite puzzle?

I am working on a Ravensburger challenge puzzle called Mahjong. It's totally kicking my butt. I have sorted the pieces twice now and have several distinctive elements put together; but nothing that is helping me get the puzzle together as a whole!

My three previous puzzles this year were a Springbok and another two Ravensburger challenge puzzles -- one called Bizarre Bookshop and one called Bottles.

I just now wiped out my local Goodwill of their collection (11 puzzles). All of the puzzles are either never opened or never pieced.

I don't often do puzzles, but recently saw a Piatnik puzzle of wine bottles in a shop window. So far I have part of the outside done. Since all the outside pieces (and a lot of the internal ones) have the wooden shelving on them, this is proving challenging.

>2 MarthaJeanne: Piatnik has some really neat puzzles. They have a cocktails puzzle that reminds me of a ballet puzzle I did years ago.

Mrs P had a long spell of doing jigsaws and got quite a few from a UK company called Wentworth. They were expensive but very nice designs on thin wood rather than card. A lot of the pieces were shaped into objects or birds, dogs etc.

I have others, but now I'll only buy Ravensburger puzzles. I just broke down the thousand-piece one of the library at Trinity College in Dublin. On my initial sort, I lay out the edge pieces and some elements, but the majority go into any of five small metal bowls, depending on the number and placement of tabs it has. As the puzzle comes together, I can then lay out the pieces according to shape and then colorings on the table.

My favorite puzzle is not a Ravensburger, though. It's an astrophotograph of a view toward the center of our galaxy; the area around Sagittarius and Scorpio. It includes labels for the celestial objects, the ecliptic, the coordinate grid. I must have put it together ten times in the thirty-plus years I've had it.

>4 PossMan: That's neat -- different piece shapes. There was a puzzle I saw recently in a Facebook group where the pieces are two part -- inner and outer -- from Ceaco.

>5 WholeHouseLibrary: That's a long time to have a puzzle that you can still put together!

This is what would happen if I tried to do a jigsaw puzzle:



Or this:

>7 lilithcat: My cat totally ignores my puzzles. Though she is inclined to jump in the middle of my Very Precisely Laid Out Pieces to headbutt me for attention.