Wrap-Up: St. Joseph North Pier Inner Lighthouse

It’s really hard to separate our feelings about doing “St. Joseph North Pier Inner Lighthouse” from our feelings about having designed it and finally having it available for the world but I’m going to give it a shot.

We’d expected that this one might be the hardest of the initial So Puzzled Puzzle Company series and it certainly wasn’t easy.  There’s a lot of dark water on the bottom half of the puzzle and it took some work to get that all figured out.  We usually do the borders first and we didn’t have the bottom edge sorted out until after the top half of the puzzle was nearly done.

That said, this one took us about ten hours total (spread over three days), so it’s not that difficult.  We have ones we literally sat with for months.  I think this felt more difficult because we wanted to get it done and get on to the next one.  More a matter of our own impatience.

As I said, we didn’t get the bottom edge done right away but we got the other edges.  I started in the bottom-left corner while Jenny immediately went to the sky.  She insists that she was not brute-forcing, as you can’t brute-force a random-cut puzzle.  After getting the decking in the corner done, I moved on to the sun, and then built out from there to get the rest of the structure around it, giving Jenny more to work off of.  Then I took care of the horizon, which Jenny latched into.  That left the aforementioned waves and spray along the bottom.

There were two things that really frustrated us that probably wouldn’t have had we not designed the puzzle ourselves.  One was that the insert photo was cropped so it didn’t show the true edges.  The other was that the linen finish looked really nice but didn’t feel like what we were going for.  The good news is that we can fix those.  It gives us ideas for what to do with SPPC’s next series.

We did love the random cut of the pieces, which, of course, is why we designed it that way.  There were some really weird shapes in there and it helped quite a bit in some of the darker spots on the puzzle.

Given our impatience, it was also really funny to us that we stopped in the middle and went to do a puzzle competition at our local library.

After we got back from that event and as we got near the end, we started panicking about possibly-missing pieces.  None were missing so it all worked out but we laughed at ourselves a bit because we couldn’t help thinking that something was wrong and we might have many, many boxes of a defective product in storage.  We never worry that much when it’s a puzzle by someone else.

And with this one done, we can let that impatience take over and move right on to the next one.