Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Waddingtons, 1979

4000 pieces

38" x 57"

purchased sealed from eBay ($19.32)

Difficulty level: Very, very tough

My first 4000-piece puzzle! I don't usually go for these pastoral scenes, but I'd heard good things about Waddingtons' quality and was looking for a 4000 to try, and this was sealed and cheap.

The pieces don't always align horizontally, as an added challenge:

Water wasn't too bad--since the pieces all had horizontal lines on them, it was easy to tell which were oriented vertically and which horizontally. Then the colors were fairly easy to tell apart.

Time to start the sky . . .

All the blues laid out.

Luckily the puzzle has a repeating cut--both halves are the same cut, flipped 180 degrees, so by dividing it in half, I could use the pattern of cut in the water to match the pattern of the sky. A very slow process, since you can only really tell very dark or very light pieces apart, and there are only a few discernible hints of cloud.

Final push.