How many pieces are missing from this vintage puzzle?

Welcome back to Karen puzzles, so in my last video I shared the wild story about the estate sale, where I got these three puzzles for relatively cheap, but acquiring vintage puzzles is only the first step. The second step is to solve the puzzles to find out if any pieces are missing, so I’m gonna get to these later, but for now I’m going to solve the Prismatic puzzle. This is a puzzle that I have wanted for so long. It is so beautiful. I’M so excited I finally got to solve it.

This puzzle was released in 1970. The puzzle itself is an octagon shape, just like the box, and the artwork was done by Claudia Carroll. So, let’s just get started and then along the way, I’m gonna share more fun facts about where this puzzle came from um some stuff about the artist about the piece cut but uh for now, let’s start puzzling. So the first thing I’m noticing about these pieces is that whoever had this already did it before because you can see there are still large sections put together, so I am definitely going to be taking those apart, so I can do the entire thing from the beginning. I actually think I’m gonna dump all of this out and then I can just take them apart, as I do the Sorting look at that look at all that red puzzle dust in there.

I finished the Sorting sort of sorting sort of didn’t mean to do that. Basically, I decided that up front. I would only divide it into little pieces and then I already separated these little guys, which are flat on the top and bottom with all of these which are not and then, of course, in the middle, I have the edge pieces and then over here I have All of the larger inside pieces, and usually I would separate these out by a piece of shape a little more carefully, but I just feel like there is enough going on in this design that I’m not sure if that’s totally necessary and plus. I don’t want to rush through this puzzle like I want to spend time with it and really enjoy doing it, so I’m not pulling out every single strategy to do a puzzle as fast as possible, but later on, if I am having trouble, you know we’ll just See I might do a little more sorting later on as we go, but for now, let’s just finally start working on it. Oh man, I just spent ages looking for some more Edge pieces and I was convinced that they were going to be missing and then I looked a little closer, usually with Springbok puzzles.

The pieces are so thick that you don’t really have the issue of them fitting. Where they don’t go, but since this is a repeating pattern, you can see that that’s really close, but it’s not quite right. So this one comes out of there. This one goes there, that’s what I had been missing and then these literally just swap around like that, and then I had found these. So I think that is that it is that the entire Edge and there we go – that is the entire Edge.

So these were some false edges that I can get out of there. Now all right, we are officially not missing any Edge pieces. I’M already loving this puzzle. It reminds me so much of the area where pattern puzzles, which are obviously a newer version than this one. Like this is the original of that type of puzzle, but I just love these bright colors, the repeating patterns, the really graphic type of illustration, so I’m not gonna rush through it.

I think I’m gonna take a little break and get back to it tomorrow. So this is about two hours and 20 minutes of progress, so it’s actually going pretty fast. I will admit that the inside, without having the edge to work off of, has been a little trickier than I thought, but I feel like It’s tricky in a good way. Not in a frustrating way, I am really loving this puzzle, so my strategy was to just start here in the Middle with this solid orange and then all of this blue. I also realized that the angles of these middle angles are a lot.

Why lighter than these angles – and I realized that the Orange is a lot lighter here in the middle and then it gradually gets darker and becomes this red around the edge. So this might look a little crazy, but basically what I did was just pull any pieces that I saw with this orange color and then I could just work my way out from the middle. By the end of the morning, I started doing all of these orange corners, and so I feel like the next thing I’ll be able to do is just slot these in all around the center. So that is the strategy update, but I also just wanted to share a little more information about this puzzle and where it came from so, as I said at the beginning, this puzzle came out in 1970 back when they were still using their original logo. Springbok released a bunch of different octagon shaped puzzles like this, so I’m gonna put a few of my other favorite designs here on screen, literally just so beautiful, and so many of them still look just so incredibly modern, even though they came out 50 years ago.

The website that I’ve talked about on here before Springbok fever – they have cataloged all of the early Springbok puzzles. So you can go scroll through that. If you want to see all of the different early designs and on this website, they are actually cataloged, which are puzzle cuts for every different puzzle used. So you can see that for this puzzle they called the puzzle cut d0508 and we can see that there are actually 508 pieces in this puzzle just like all of the Springbok boxes, they just say more than 500 pieces here on the box. We can see that there are actually 37 different Springbok puzzles that all used, this exact same puzzle cut, and they even show you how many pieces are in the Rings going around each layer of the puzzle and they show an example showing the center portion of the Design, so you can see how mine matches up to the picture that is on the website, all right, I’m gonna get back to the puzzle, but I’m just like, if you thought watching somebody do a jigsaw puzzle on YouTube was nerdy like how nerdy is it To get to fall down the rabbit hole and get obsessed with categorizing, the different puzzle cuts that each puzzle within a specific brand 50 years ago was using like this is getting so specific.

Now, all right, I have a little more information to share about the artist who designed this, but I’m gonna get back to that in a little bit. I’M working on these purple pieces and I have finally figured out how this center part is going to connect to the edge you can see right here these two pieces. They actually go right there, so basically, this has to turn all the way over here. Wish me luck rotating this thing. I did it and I’m actually really happy um.

These two don’t connect, there’s going to be something else going on in the middle there. So I’m really happy that it only connects right there, where I noticed and then right here, which is another one that doesn’t totally lock in. I was worried if it connected in like six different places. I would feel really dumb for not noticing where it went in before I just finished my first complete eighth of this puzzle, so I figured this would be a great time to take another little break and talk a little bit more about the artwork and the artist. So this artwork was done by Claudia Carroll.

I looked her up online. I couldn’t find a ton of information, so most of what I’m going to tell you is going to come from the back of the box, so this artwork is an original painting. It was an oil painting, it was 20 inches by 20 inches and that is the exact same size as the puzzle. So the original painting was basically just this, but on a canvas – and I actually love how this was and original painting, because that means there are some imperfections that you wouldn’t get if it was done just on a computer like it would be these days like you, Can see right here, these two color others are overlapping a tiny little bit and then every so often like right here you can see a little bit of white between the colors, where the paint didn’t quite line up with the color next to it. So I just love noticing those little human touches that, like I said you just don’t get these days when everything is digital, so Claudia Carroll was born in Paris.

She studied at the Museum School of Fine Arts. Yeah there are a lot of different art schools. She’S exhibited all over the country in Europe, South America and New York and on eBay. I actually found this flier from one of her solo shows in New York. Can you just imagine how incredible the fashion must have been at this hip pop art show in New York in the 60s, like I can’t even imagine.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a lot of examples of her other artwork online, but here are a couple different paintings and some art in other mediums that I found um just really really beautiful work, but back to puzzles. She actually also designed some other puzzles for Springbok or at least a license to the paintings to be made as puzzles. I don’t know if they were originally intended to be puzzles or not so I’ll have all of those on screen right now, so you can see all of these different examples of her artwork on these puzzles and as you saw some of her art showed up on The mini spring box – and I actually saw one of them at the estate sale where I bought this puzzle. The lot that I bought was in this cabinet and then on the shelf above it the bookshelf. I just saw this mini Springbok puzzle and it turns out it was another art piece by the same artist and it would have been so easy to just pick it up and throw it in my bag when no one was looking.

I bet the person who bought that lot of all of the books up there didn’t even care, didn’t even know what they had, but I was a good person so I didn’t take it. I left it behind so anyway, I’m gonna go ahead and finish up. The puzzle now I’m starting to get pretty hopeful that there aren’t any pieces missing, although I won’t know for sure until I put the last piece in so let’s get back to it. Thank you. Oh my gosh, I’m so happy.

There are officially no missing pieces. This was such a find. I’M, like you guys, don’t even know, I’m so happy right now that I own this puzzle and it’s in such good condition. Thank you. I mean once you divide what I paid by three.

I basically got each of these puzzles for like 11 12 each, and you would never get this puzzle for 12 on eBay. So what everyone always wants to know is how long it took me. As I said before, this was not too difficult of a puzzle. It took me five and a half hours and I probably could have done it faster, but I really did just want to take my time and enjoy the puzzle, especially at the end where I basically try to do it like a clock and just go in order. I can definitely see myself returning to this one over and over again, and you guys know how I’m keeping my spreadsheet of all of the puzzles I’m doing this year and I’m giving them a rating.

Well, this one is, of course, this one’s getting the full 5 out of 5 star ours. I think it’s like the seventh puzzle that I’ve given it to this year and, oh my gosh. I thought that occurred to me while I was working on this way. I was just thinking about the woman who owned this, who owned the house that the estate sale was at. I don’t know if she passed away, I don’t know if she was just downsizing and moving somewhere else, but clearly she loved puzzles.

So I can just see her like watching this video and being like. Of course, there are no missing pieces. I loved puzzles. I kept my puzzles in such good shape. Of course I didn’t lose any pieces anyway.

I’M sure the other thing that you’re all wondering about is what I’m gonna do with these two puzzles, the butterflies one. I think I’m gonna solve a series of YouTube shorts, so stay tuned for those to find out. If any pieces are missing from this one and then this zodiac one I actually I’m gonna solve for an exclusive video over on patreon. So you can sign up to patreon for three dollars a month and then you’ll get access to my entire library of exclusive videos and at the time that you’re watching this video you can head over there and the video where I solve this puzzle will already be Up so let me know in a comment um: what do you think of this puzzle? Is it one that you would want to try your code word for the comments?

If you watched all the way to the end, would it be an octagon ? I think that’s it for today, so happy puzzling and I will see you all in the next one.