Doing a $2,000 Personalized Jigsaw Puzzle

A present for me from wha for little old, karen hello, everybody welcome back to festive time here on karen puzzles. Today i have a very exciting puzzle. It came in the mail from par puzzles and, if you know like you know how exciting this is, if you don’t know of them, i will explain it to you in just a minute, but i got this like a month ago. It’S been sitting here, gift wrapped. So i’m just gon na go ahead and open it up right now, because i really want to know.

What’S inside oh boy, oh my god, i can see the black box. Oh my god check that out. My very own par puzzle. I feel like this is the extremely nerdy version of all the girls who unbox like designer handbags, but this is basically a designer puzzle. Okay, on the side, we have a label, it looks like it’s 600 pieces.

Oh boy par time is 11 hours and 40 minutes. What did i get myself into certificate of authenticity tissue paper? Oh my god. This is so fancy. Oh, like there are flower petals in here.

Okay, there are like layers happening, so i’m gon na wait to really dig in until i can do the close-up. But, oh my gosh wait. Wait! The flower petals are attached to the pieces. What what is this okay so before i really get into it?

Let me just tell you what is happening so par puzzles is a luxury like hand-cut wooden puzzle. Company they’ve been around since 1932 they’re, one of the oldest like continually running puzzle companies in existence. There is a great new york times article about them, i’ll link it down below. If you want to read more about the history of the company, but it’s currently run by john and justin madden out of long island, new york city and when i say luxury puzzles, um their hand. Cut puzzles tend to run in the like 2 000 range.

And i don’t know about you, but i am not somebody who has two thousand dollars to drop on a jigsaw puzzle. Their clients over the years have included like the rockefellers marilyn monroe um, george h.w bush. You know like some of the most famous people and rich people in the world, so when justin got in touch with me and wanted to send me a par puzzle, i was just like yes absolutely. I will take anything you want to send me.

I will like have it on loan. I will give it back to you, but he thought i could keep this one. So, although maybe i should have expected something a little different from what is on their website because in his email to me, he says yesterday i finished what i would call an avant-garde par puzzle. Nothing risque, just over the top more like art assembly will be challenging. However, it will look really cool and it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen.

So that’s what we’re doing today, the par time that i mentioned on the side, that’s something that they’ve had ever since the company started when the original founder would assemble every single puzzle like as fast as he could, and that would be the time that their customers Had to beat these days they just kind of estimate the par time, but i did not know that i was signing up for an 11 hour puzzle. So if i don’t finish this video by christmas and i’m posting like a festive video in february now, you know why all right, let me reset and then i’ll show you what is inside this very fancy box, [, Music, ], all right here we go here. We go for real this time so, as i said, it has a certificate of authenticity and that’s how you know something is very fancy. We’Ve also got a business card with their signature, seahorse shape on there, and now this is what we’re all here for the hand-cut wooden puzzle pieces. So, on the first layer it looks like we have a handful of pieces that all have flowers and leaves like literally attached to them like what i’ve justin was right.

I have never seen a puzzle like this before and just look at how thick and beautiful these pieces are. These are hand cut on a scroll, saw all right, so i’m gon na very carefully try to lift this top layer off and then let’s see what we have underneath, oh wow. So now we have a handful of normal puzzle pieces again. This beautiful thick wood all hand cut, wait, wait, wait! Oh my god.

I see letters. I see an r, i see an e. Is this? What i think it is? I just found an n and a k.

I found the a look at that. Oh, my god, i didn’t know it was gon na be this personalized. This is so beautiful. I’Ve never seen anything more beautiful in my entire life. So looking at the actual pieces, i see a lot of pink just a lot of the same kind of texture across all of it.

So i don’t know what this is actually going to be a picture of, and that’s one of the things with par puzzles ever since the beginning, they would never put a picture on the box, actually, all jigsaw puzzle makers used to do that like way back in The day when you couldn’t easily print like reproductions of images, but parr has decided to continue with that tradition. So all of their puzzles are one of a kind and there’s no picture on the box you’re just going in blind all right, i’m going to get all of these pieces out of the box just see what we’re dealing with and then i’ll be back. To start start, my 11 hours of putting it together, apparently [ Music ], so i just took all of the pieces out of the box, and i just realized that there’s actually another layer of puzzle pieces at the bottom. It looks like down here. We have all of these specialty shaped pieces, including their signature, seahorse, and then we’ve also got some acrobats and some dancers.

These are super fun, but i guess they were just packaged separately so that they wouldn’t get damaged [, Music ]. All right, i have everything out of the box and on the table. Well, i decided to leave the flower pieces in the box top just because they take up a lot of table real estate and i think i’m gon na need all of the space that i can use. Here’S my strategy going into it. First, i’m going to turn over all of the pieces and just kind of get a feel for what we’re working with.

I do see a couple straight edges, so i’ll sort all of those out and then, when it comes to tackling the middle, since all of the pieces are a random cut, that makes a little more difficult, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking at and what You’Re piecing together, so i think that i can work outwards from these specialty shapes, because the inside shapes that create these like people forms those will be more unique than all of the traditional like jigsaw puzzle. Knobs. One thing i am worried about is that all of the flower pieces seem to just live in the middle of the puzzle like it doesn’t seem like they’re edge pieces at first. I thought. Maybe the flowers would create a frame around the outside, which would be a little easier.

But i’ll just have to keep in mind that if i can’t find a piece, i’m looking for from the main well of pieces that i’ll have to check the flower box, which is not a step, i usually have to think about when doing a jigsaw puzzle. But i guess my par time begins now, so, let’s get into it all right! I just finished the sorting. Let me show you all the different piles that i sorted them into so here we have all of the edge pieces and a lot of them are like curved edge pieces, because this definitely is not a fully rectangular puzzle. So i just pulled any piece that had like a pretty long flat side, even if it wasn’t perfectly straight, although there will definitely be at least one fully straight edge, because i noticed on the back.

A lot of these pieces have this kind of light band in the wood right on the edge there. You can see three of them there, so you know, i guess that’s just the way that the puzzle was cut. Is it cheating to use the wood grain as another clue um, maybe, but i’m just gon na go with it. I’M gon na use all the help i can get and actually, if you look at the wood grain, you can tell like what direction every single piece is gon na need to go in so i’ll just keep that in the back of my head. If i get stuck later on, it looks like we have this one little part that is this: like blue stripy area, we have these kind of solid red pieces, some solid black and then all of our shaped pieces.

There also seems to be quite a bit of this yellow like striped and polka dot texture, so probably after i finish what i’ve already pulled, that’ll be the next thing i work on, i mean so far. It doesn’t seem like this is going to take me 11 hours. It seems straightforward enough. I might regret saying that like six hours from now, but let me give it a go and we’ll see what we have [: Music ] [, Music ]. So here’s where we are after about a half hour you can see, i have two pretty large sections going and i’m having such a great time.

I love this i feel like. I want to cry not because it’s hard finally like for the first time, but because it’s just so beautiful, like i just keep getting the feeling of like this, is what jigsaw puzzles could be like this is what they used to be. This is what this is like. The peak hustling experience and i have done hand-cut jigsaw, puzzles before i did a whole video about puzzle, michelle wilson, which is a french hand-cut puzzle company, and with these i’m getting the same feeling that i did with those where you can just feel the craftsmanship and You know that a real person cut every single line and every single connector, and so it’s just such a real connection between you and the puzzle maker and especially for this one, where i’ve been emailing with justin, the guy who actually did cut this puzzle. It just feels like such a like special experience and i’m almost like.

I get the idea behind par time, but i kind of just want to disregard it, because this is the type of puzzle where i just want to take my time and really savor the experience. Not try to rush through it not worry about the time at all, even the way that i’m filming it like. I started doing the time lapse, but i feel, like you, don’t even need a time lapse for this puzzle. You just need those beautiful close-ups of each piece like sliding into place, because the pieces are so thick um, it’s just so satisfying to connect them properly. So it’s just making such a beautiful like finished surface and yeah, i’m having so much fun with this.

I love this. Thank you justin. Oh one, more thing i wanted to say um, i did end up with these little standalone pieces. Uh par is actually known for having cutouts in the middle of their puzzles. So i assume these will go.

You know somewhere like that, but i think oh maybe over here, maybe in that one i don’t know – maybe i’ll have to wait until the whole thing is finished and then see where they fit in [ Music. ]. Look at that. I just put in the first flower piece um. It’S definitely going to be a challenge to work around that and have to keep moving it.

So i can like see what’s underneath, but you know i’m up for a good puzzle challenge. This is so beautiful. Oh my gosh, i love this [ Music, ] [, Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music, ], all right. It’S been a few hours and let me show you my progress. I am loving this i’m having so much fun.

So you can see. I have quite a few large sections going um all of the the flowers though, and the leaves are kind of blocking all of my progress, which has been a little annoying as i’ve been working because you know i have to keep moving these out of the way. Luckily, they swivel all the way around, so i can see what i’m working on as long as i push them out of the way, but i realized that, like all of this color of leaf was all gon na be in the same area, so this probably connects Somewhere around here, i have this large section right here and then this and then a few more of these like little stand-alone pieces. So i still can’t really tell what the final shape is going to be, but i’m definitely making progress. I don’t think it’s going to take me the full 11 hours that the box predicted so yeah i’ll work on it more this afternoon, [ Music ] all right, everybody.

It is 3 p.m and i’m definitely on the home stretch. I’M probably like at least two-thirds. Maybe three-quarters of the way through? Let me show you so you can see that all of the different pieces that i had separate before are now all attached and i have attached my name karen.

The design is becoming revealed. You can see this like toucan head in the center here and then just lots of different designs and flowers all around. I probably should have realized that the different types of leaves and flowers would all be grouped together. Like you can see, all of these leaves are what i’ve left and they’re all the same. So i probably could have separated this out from the beginning, but it’s fine, so everything along here seems to be like a flat edge and it’s finished so everything that i have left seems like it’ll just be up in this top section and then i’ll be done.

I would love to know where the 11 hour estimate came from, because this is definitely not going to take me 11 hours, [, Music, ], [, Music, ], okay, so i might have gotten a little um big on myself, because this last part has been so hard. I’Ve been working on it for the last hour and a half, and let me show you how little progress i’ve made look at that like i don’t know why this is so hard there aren’t that many pieces left, but since they’re all like random cuts. I don’t know what the full shape i’m looking for is going to be and yeah i mean. Are there even enough pieces left to fill this entire section? I don’t really know what i’m making, because it’s um you know.

I don’t have a picture to reference. So it’s definitely slow going at this point. Maybe that 11 hours was in fact accurate, [ Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music, ] [, Music ]. Oh my god, i just finished it. That last part, i will say, is like one of the most difficult sections of jigsaw puzzles i’ve ever done ever in my life like that, took probably as long to do just that half as it took to do the entire rest of the puzzle.

But can we, though, can we just look at how beautiful that is? Oh, my gosh, it’s so nice, however, i’m exhausted um. I will be back tomorrow to give you my final thoughts, [ Music ]. So what do you think is this? Not one of the most amazing jigsaw puzzles that you’ve ever seen.

It’S not even like just a jigsaw puzzle. It’S using the medium of jigsaw, puzzles to create a work of art. I’Ve actually thought about how to add 3d elements like this to puzzles for a while. Now, like i don’t know like faux fur or different types of paper, different textures, i don’t know how that would work for like mass produced puzzles but for one-off handmade puzzles like this there’s just so much to explore there. It’S basically combining the art of collage with the medium of jigsaw puzzles.

However, i do want to clarify that par puzzles do not typically have 3d elements like this. Justin told me that this is the first time that he has made such an intricate like 3d puzzle. Like this, with flowers to represent feathers, i really hope he keeps experimenting, though, because it adds such a beautiful, unique layer onto this puzzle, and it also adds an extra level of difficulty, mostly because i kept having to like move the flowers out of the way to Even see what i was working on and a lot of the times, the flowers would block the edges of the different sections that i put together. So it was harder to figure out how the sections all fit together when i couldn’t see the edges and for the pieces that have the flowers and the leaves attached. I can’t see the entire piece at once, so i would keep missing the piece that i was looking for, because the part that i was looking for was being blocked by the flower, but i mean obviously i finished it.

So it was a fun challenge, only occasionally getting a little frustrating, but i feel so honored to be able to own a par puzzle, especially one that is personalized with my name. I hope you guys liked seeing it and getting to experience through this video what it would be like to put one of their puzzles together. I know that most of us obviously do not have two thousand dollars to spend on a jigsaw puzzle, although if you do, i have got a merch shop if you’re looking to spend some of that money on jigsaw, puzzle shirts, but anyway, if you’re not looking to Spend two thousand dollars on a puzzle: um par, has actually launched the l series, which is a series of laser-cut, puzzles that they’ve recently started making those run about 200, each which is still a lot. I know, but it’s a little more manageable than when you get into the thousands, and if you get one you can say that you have a par puzzle and you can join this very exclusive club with the rockefellers and marilyn monroe. And me apparently also.

I did want to mention: there is an l series puzzle that is a guitar, not a functional guitar, but it does have real picks as puzzle pieces and it has the knobs and some other hardware attached so again, playing with 3d elements on top of a traditional Puzzle in a really fun way, so, even though it upped the difficulty, i actually loved having no idea what i was putting together or what shape it was going to be. You know sometimes i’ll hide the puzzle box and not look at it. While i’m working on the puzzle, but in those cases i’ve always at least like glanced at the final image, so i kind of know what i’m getting into. Whereas with this i was going in completely blind. You know these cutouts.

I had no idea where they were going to be. I didn’t know what shape the outside was going to be. Obviously i didn’t know what the picture was going to be also the random cut, definitely ups, the difficulty and the places where they cut along the color line. Those parts are so hard because it creates false edges inside the puzzle and there are no clues on the opposing puzzle pieces that they’re gon na go next to each other. But even with all of those challenges, the picture was varied enough that it went together pretty easily, except for that last section, which was so hard towards the end.

There were so many times where i was convinced that justin had just forgotten to include some puzzle pieces, because the piece that i was looking for did not exist, and then obviously, eventually i found it and because of the random cut, it was just a completely different Shape than what i thought i was looking for, so my final time for this puzzle was about six hours, which is a lot for a 600 piece puzzle, but it is about half what the par time on the box was estimated to be, although maybe i should Amend that to like six and a half hours, maybe seven hours, because there were times where i would just turn off the camera and just stare at the puzzle, trying to figure out how the sections went together or just trying to find like this. One piece that i couldn’t spot anywhere, but i ended up with six hours of footage, so you know somewhere in that realm and you guys should be really glad that i know how to edit videos, because without doing the time lapse and speeding it up, there is So much of the footage that just looks like this, where literally nothing is happening where literally minutes go by between putting in a single piece. So i would love to know in a comment: have you ever done any kind of custom puzzle whether you got a family photo made into a puzzle, or maybe you cut one yourself out of wood or, if you’ve painted a puzzle? So your code word for this video will be flower and, if you’re new here the code word, is something that you can put into your comment so that i’ll know from reading your comment that you watched all the way to the end of the video, and that Makes you my favorite puzzler, alright, so actually, my next video is gon na be a puzzle. That’S not this expensive, but still a little pricey, it’s one that i’ve been wanting for a really long time, so i finally bought it for myself as a little christmas present.

So stay tuned for that i’ll see you next week in that video bye, everyone