SOLID WHITE Spilt Milk Jigsaw Puzzle

Hi everyone welcome back to karen puzzles, so i knew that i wanted to do one more christmas video before the end of the year, and i also wanted to do one more vintage puzzle. So i was trying to think which of my vintage puzzles are the most festive. I had been wanting to do the spilt milk puzzle and i started thinking on christmas. You put out milk and cookies for santa, so this is basically a christmas puzzle. So that’s what we’re going with today just stay with me here.

This is a solid white puzzle which ends up in the shape of a puddle of milk. This was released by the synergistics or research corporation in the early 80s and at the end of the video i’m going to talk more about this company because they actually released a lot of really interesting products. But for now let’s take a closer look at the milk puzzle and also the chocolate milk puzzle, which is a lot more rare, but i managed to get my hands on one [, Music ]. So here is my dilemma with these puzzles. Obviously, you can see they come in these milk carton boxes and both of mine are still sealed up at the top.

In the picture on the side, it looks like you’re supposed to open up the top to get the pieces out, but as a puzzle, collector i’d like to keep the boxes as pristine as possible. So i’m going to attempt to go in through the bottom and pull the pieces out that way, all right, so the pieces are in. Oh, oh, my god. Okay, so the pieces are in a plastic bag inside the box. Oh well, that just came open.

Okay, it looks like this adhesive on the bottom. I might have to pull that apart in order to open this up to get in there all right, that’s fine, because i can. I can always like glue that back or tape it back. So it looks the same, whereas if i opened up the top, it would always look different. You know it would look opened.

Okay, i’m doing it. I’M just gon na open up this flap ooh there we go. Okay, and here are the pieces. Oh, since i hadn’t opened this yet i haven’t ever seen what the pieces look like in real life. I’M so excited for this.

So let me quickly just do the same thing with the chocolate milk puzzle: [, Music, ]. Okay, this looks really fun. I didn’t know that the pieces would be so random. Like look at these pieces, the shapes are totally random um. A lot of these shapes remind me of the springbok random cuts, especially since we do have some regular shaped puzzle pieces mixed in there.

Looking at the pieces, the finish is definitely very glossy, which we already knew, because the box describes the puzzle as wet looking, which personally, i think is really gross like just say glossy. It’S fine. Looking at the pieces, um they’re, definitely not nearly as thick as the springbok pieces. You can see. The cardboard is pretty thin um.

You know it’s, okay, it’s it’s not great! On the back. We have this kind of matte white card, so i mean since it’s a solid white puzzle, you could do it face up or face down the chocolate milk pieces. Look basically exactly the same, except that, obviously it’s easier to tell which side is the front and which side is the back. I assume that these puzzles are gon na, have the exact same cut, because you can see that the shape that we’re gon na be creating is exactly the same between both of them and it, you know, wouldn’t make sense for them to make an all-new die when It’S essentially the same puzzle, but in a different color.

So i assume the shapes between the two are exactly the same. Oh really, quick. Let me just tell you a story about the chocolate milk puzzle, so i had this one on my wish list for a while. Now um the regular milk one is pretty easy to find the chocolate milk one is definitely more rare. So a few weeks ago i was just on ebay clicking around seeing what puzzles were available and i think, rather than typing, in the spilt milk title.

I think i just looked for this company synergistics research corp and then suddenly, this one popped up for sale, except the person who was selling it had misspelled the name as split milk instead of spilt milk. So, since split is still a word, that’s why it wasn’t getting like spell checked and it wasn’t coming up in my other searches. So the price that i got this at was actually really good for such a rare puzzle. I don’t think the person who was selling this knew what they had clearly, because they didn’t even spell the name right, oh and i don’t think i even said, but these are 350 piece puzzles so even though they are solid, colored puzzles i feel like. I can probably finish them in one day.

The piece shapes are unique enough that i should be able to use that to help piece it together, even though there’s no image so let’s get set up and then i’ll be back to start working on it. I kind of wonder if this is going to be one of those puzzles again where i’m like. I don’t think it’ll be that hard and then three days later i’m like i cannot finish this puzzle: [, Music, ], [, Music, ], i so [, Music, ], [, Music, ], all right so 18 minutes in and who saw this coming, i’m already like what have I gotten myself into why. Why do i do this to myself? Look at how crazy those piece shades are it’s really striking on camera, but it’s definitely going to be real difficult to do as a puzzle.

So over here for the white puzzle, you can see that i started pulling out the kind of standard piece shapes, but there really aren’t a lot of them so over here this one looks a little more organized. So again i pulled the standard piece shapes um down here i have what are probably edge pieces, so i think i’m gon na start working on the brown one just because i find it easier to look at dark pieces on a white background versus white pieces on A dark background also this puzzle came with a few pieces already put together and normally i would take those apart before i start working, but this puzzle is difficult enough that hopefully you’ll forgive me for just leaving them and using that as a little hint to get Started so here’s another one, these two pieces were connected and you can see it’s this tiny little edge that that makes this kind of standard looking piece shape. So that’s where we’re at that’s, where we’re starting i’ll check back in in a little bit: [: Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music ], oh man! That was a much more difficult puzzle than i expected. It’S only 350 pieces.

How tricky could it be? Well? The answer is very now. Unfortunately, i did have a few technical difficulties in the middle of filming that so i didn’t have as much in-progress footage as i would have liked. But i do have the data and i also have a lot of thoughts on this puzzle which i’m going to get to in just a minute, but first i’m sure you’re wondering am i also going to do the regular milk puzzle now?

Originally, the plan was to do these simultaneously. However, as i started working on this one – and i realized just how difficult it was going to be, i was like i’m not doing that. I’M just going to do the one, so i just i can’t do the whole thing from scratch all over again, like i just can’t so instead, since these have the exact same cut, i’m just going to use this one as a guide and put this one together On top of it, that should make the whole thing go a lot faster because i’ll know like what piece shape i’m looking for next and i can literally just fill the whole thing in. If you think that’s cheating, i don’t care and i don’t want to hear it it’s christmas. Just let me have this.

Let me do it this way. What would have been cheating is that online there are pictures of the finished puzzle, so i could have looked at those to see like what piece shape i was looking for next, when i was getting really stuck, but i didn’t do that. I did it once entirely on my own, so i think that gives me the right to uh take a few shortcuts for the second one, so [, Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music, ], all right who’s, ready for some data, so the chocolate Milk puzzle ended up taking me eight hours and 35 minutes and i actually worked on it over two days: the regular milk puzzle. What took me at two hours to recreate on top of this one, and obviously i did that all in one go. So let’s talk about all of the things that i liked about these puzzles.

It was definitely a very high degree of difficulty, but it was still doable. I never felt completely stuck, even though it did take me quite a while to finish, but i mean i did finish it. I got there in the end. They definitely did some really inventive things with some of the piece shapes and there are some wild piece shapes in there, which are just extra satisfying once you figure out where they go. Some of them literally don’t look like anything like if you kind of block out everything around it, but then you figure out where it goes, and suddenly the logic makes sense like over.

Here you can see this is kind of a typical puzzle, piece shape, but they just sliced it right in half, and so it ends up being much more difficult. So i think they were definitely inspired by spring box. Piece shapes and puzzle designs because springbok was a very popular puzzle company at the time that these were released, but they didn’t quite hit the mark in the way that springbok always does, because the puzzles don’t lock together. You can see any time that i run my hands over it. It all just comes apart, and i think the reason for this is that they included too many false edges.

So there just aren’t enough pieces to really lock in really tightly like some of the pieces that they chopped in half. Have this little mini puzzle piece shape, and i actually did use that as a strategy. While i was working on it, the first time i found all of the little mini shapes and i could pair those up – and i wish they had done that more throughout the entire puzzle, because for so many of these, it’s literally just a curved line or a Straight line that holds two pieces together, and so entire sections can just separate off of the puzzle with barely any effort. I also think they made the cardboard too thin, like part of the reason why spring box puzzles are so solid, at least the vintage ones they’re. So solid that you can like throw them around and it all stays together, because the cardboard for those is so thick that the pieces just really grab onto each other, whereas in these the cardboard is really thin.

So everything just kind of slides apart. So these puzzles are definitely pretty cheaply made. I don’t think the quality is quite at the level. I wish it would have been it, but i do like how inventive it is. I’Ve never seen a puzzle like this before and i love the packaging.

I love how fun and campy it is. Oh and there’s one more thing that i didn’t mention before about the boxes. I love how in this photo that’s on the box. You can tell that they must have made a mock-up of the box to photograph, because the design that’s on the box in the photo is not on the box in the one that you can buy. So i just have to wonder if these mock-ups are like in someone’s attic somewhere.

I wish that i could get my hands on those [ Music ] all right, so the people who made this puzzle must have thought that they had a big hit on their hands because not only did they make the spilt milk puzzle and the chocolate spilt milk Puzzle they also released the exact same puzzle in red, yellow and blue in their wet paint series. The wet paint puzzles are fairly rare, so i didn’t think that i would be able to show you one in person, but would you just look at what i happen to have? This is the blue, wet paint puzzle, and i was already working on this video when this popped up on ebay, so i just bought it immediately. You can see on the back that there’s a red one, a yellow one and then the blue one, which i have and in the the picture of the completed puzzle, it’s the exact same shape. If we open it up the pieces, look exactly the same.

Only they’re blue, so you know just repurposing the same puzzle but in two different series. Honestly, i think they should have made the whole rainbow. Do an orange one and called it spilt, orange juice, a purple one and call it spilt grape juice, a green one, spilt green smoothie that might be a little ahead of its time: [, Music, ], all right! So now i want to talk a little bit about the company synergistics or research corporation. They were active in the late 70s through the 80s and, as you can see, they released a lot of puzzles that look like food.

I am obsessed with everything that they made. This is like the definition of camp. I know that everyone is like throwing around the word camp lately, but i truly think these are like the campiest puzzles. I’Ve ever seen. I’Ve been interested in these for a while and then when i decided to make this video.

I went on ebay and i spent 200

Starting to collect all of these, i’m not gon na go through all of them in detail in this video, but let me know if you’d be interested in seeing them in another video in terms of jigsaw puzzles. They had a pretty eclectic variety, so obviously they had the milk puzzles and the wet paint puzzles another food. One is this mixed nuts puzzle, which is 200 pieces? They also had a new york times, crossword puzzle jigsaw puzzle which doesn’t really seem to fit. The food theme, and then there’s also this broken record puzzle which seems super rare, so the other puzzles that they made are more of just like plastic little brain teaser type of puzzles.

I want to give a shout out to beachpackagingdesign.com and robspuzzlepage.com, because they’re pretty much the only place on the internet that i could find anyone talking about this company. So it’s only through those two sites that i was able to compile a list of like all the puzzles that this company made and i was able to start searching for them and that’s the thing there really is not a lot of information out there about this Company, i have no idea what happened to them after the 80s or like where they came from why the company started literally. The only official thing that i can find is a patent which they filed for this circular puzzle design, which i think is basically what this miller high life puzzle is so through that patent.

There are three names attached to this company. I looked all three of them up, two of them i think, have passed away and then the third um his name is so common that, like i, couldn’t find the person that it was referring to, but i couldn’t find anything else that connected any of these people To that company, so i think over christmas i might have my sister do a little digging into this company see if she can find anything out, because she is a little better at research than i am. But if any of you have personal connections to this company or know something that i don’t please get in touch [, Music ]. In the meantime, i hope santa is happy with this milk and cookies display, i’m leaving out on christmas eve night. I hope she brings me lots of puzzles on christmas morning.

[ Music, ] ho ho ho ho santa puzzles here. If you think karen has been on the nice list this year, make sure that you hit that subscribe button as a christmas gift from you to her. Oh, this is the nice list for sure she left me a puzzle and a plate of cookies, happy holidays, and now i’ve got some more puzzles to deliver.