I attempted Simone Giertzs Solid White Puzzle

I attempted Simone Giertz’s Solid White Puzzle (with one piece missing!)

I attempted Simone Giertz Solid White Puzzle

(with one piece missing!)

When this puzzle was first announced, I swear every single person on the internet sent me the link, so you can all calm down because I’m doing it today. If you don’t know, this is the solid white puzzle with one-piece missing released by Simone Giertzs. She is an inventor here on YouTube. You’ve, probably seen some of her videos. She made this really nifty jigsaw puzzle table which is, unlike any other puzzle, I’ve ever seen, and she just released a puzzle which, as I said, it’s a solid white puzzle, but there is intentionally one piece missing um, because I thought it would be funny.

So you can see all over the box. This is really fun 499 of 500 pieces included. This puzzle has one piece that is missing and 499 that aren’t certified, incomplete puzzle created by Simone Giertzs, who confirms that she is not sorry. So, of course, the gimmick is really funny here, but what I want to do in this video is see how it fares as an actual puzzle from an actual puzzle expert. That’s me: I’m the puzzle expert, so, okay, I think the first thing I need to do is cover my table with a backdrop because um white pieces on a white table is not gonna work out so well, oh wow.

Look at how beautiful those white pieces look against this teal background. I guess I don’t really have to keep the box up here because it’s not like there’s a picture to work off of so simony did this puzzle in 19 hours and 23 minutes? So that’s my time to beat, but I actually just did this vintage solid, colored puzzle. It’s also 500 pieces also random cut, and this one took me 10 hours and 25 minutes. So that’s the actual time that I’m gonna try to beat.

I want to try to do this in let’s say under 10 hours. That’s gonna be really fast for a solid colored puzzle, but before I get started, let’s take a minute to hear from today’s sponsor skill share. So if you don’t know, skill share is an online learning. Community with thousands of creative classes for anyone who loves learning, you can learn so many different skills from really knowledgeable teachers with great production value. I am out here at my makeshift sewing desk because I love altering my own clothes, especially the stuff I get secondhand, but I never like formally learned how to do it, so I’m not great at it, especially shoulders.

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We have this shape with the two squares at the bottom. Then we have this one with the one square all pointing the same way. Then we have the standard piece shapes and the castles in here we have all of the edges up here are all of these, with um squares on all sides and they’re, actually more with three rather than four and then just a single one with all outs, all The way around and then over here on this side, these are all of the random wacky shaped pieces. You can see that there are a lot of false edges in this puzzle, so a little trick that I like to do is to just run your finger along that edge and on this one you can feel that it’s actually a little bit concave. Now, when the puzzle was first announced, there was a bit of confusion because the promo photos had a standard ribbon cut, whereas the one that she showed in the video had a random cut plus on the front of the box.

It looks like a regular ribbon cut piece, but I can confirm that it is in fact the random cut that she was doing in her video. I’M sure that when they were shooting the promo photos, they just had a sample come in. They didn’t have the actual product yet, but I mean even within a random cut puzzle, you can see that you can still pull out a lot of similar like standard shapes. So that’s what I’ve done now. I’M gonna get started on the edge, and then I can update you on how difficult I think it actually is once I’ve started actually putting it together.

Okay, the edge is done almost I’m just missing this one piece which honestly for a puzzle with this many false edges, like only missing one piece, is pretty good. I hope that’s, not the piece, that’s uh missing from the entire puzzle. Yeah! That’s the thing about this puzzle is like you can never get too stuck on one spot, because you don’t know if that’s the missing piece so far, I really didn’t have any trouble with the ah okay. Actually, I was gonna say something else first, but let me start here.

The other tricky thing with this edge is that a lot of them don’t actually connect to each other. So I think this is right, but you know there’s a chance I may have to swap some of this around also. I already started filling in some of the interior pieces, especially where it doesn’t fully connect like that. But what I was starting to say is that I really didn’t have any trouble putting this all together and I really didn’t have any issues with false fits. You know we’ll see if that comes up as I go and if I have to rearrange things, but so far, I’m totally happy with the quality of the pieces, so now that it’s time to start working on the inside.

This is the point where organizing everything like this and laying out all the pieces in a grid gets so important. It’s like when I’m looking for a piece like this. I know that it has to be like a castle or one of these guys. I can automatically eliminate all of these pieces and all of these pieces, but the tricky thing with this puzzle is that there are so many random cut pieces with so many different, like types of shapes within them that you do also have to look at all of These pieces as well it’s just about 1pm right now. I just stopped for lunch, so I am good for the entire afternoon.

Let’s get back to it, so um, okay, so update this puzzle is no joke. I went into it so confident, but I just spent another five hours straight working on it, and this is as far as I got so I’m up to what is that, like six six and a half hours right now, so I feel like finishing it in 10 Hours may have been a little ambitious. I do think 19 hours is still perfectly doable, though, because you have to remember that this beginning part is easily the hardest part of the whole puzzle. Just because you have so many options that you have to look through, but once you get to like the two-thirds mark, there are a few enough pieces that it goes together really fast, but right now I am so tired. My brain hurts.

I need to go. Not look at puzzle pieces for a while all right, it is a brand new day. I’M going to finish this puzzle today, positive self-talk, that’s what’s gonna get me through this. I wanted to wear white to match the puzzle, but I don’t actually have a lot of white shirts. So that’s why you’re getting um Barbie today!

So okay, I have a theory. I think that this is the missing piece, because I’m trying to remember back from Simone’s video and I feel like the missing piece in her video – looked something like this. I checked with simony in a D.M. and she confirmed to me that it is the same piece that is missing from every copy of this puzzle. It’s not a truly random piece that they picked out, but I’m not gonna go back and check the video. I think that would be crossing the line into cheating.

I also asked simony if she herself or someone on her team had designed the cut of this puzzle. She confirmed that they didn’t. It came from the manufacturer. She wanted to make this puzzle because it was actually based on a short film that she made about a similar, solid white puzzle with a piece missing. So while I would have liked to see a more custom design of the puzzle from her, I know from recent personal experience just how complicated and expensive it is to try to get a custom puzzle die cut made.

So I totally understand why she didn’t go that route for her first puzzle release and I’m sure getting the manufacturer to take out a piece from every puzzle was already enough of a logistical nightmare. So anyway, it is just about 10 a.m. Now so I’m gonna get back to it and, let’s see how I do today, the thing about this puzzle is that I keep getting stuck for like minutes at a time which, when you’re working on a jigsaw puzzle is a really long time between pieces and What that means is that every single time I put in a piece, even if it’s as tiny as that, it feels like a victory, because it gives me a little new information to work off of and it can feel really frustrating. But I promise, if you stick with it by the end, it gets way way easier.

So I want to share a quick tip for a random cut puzzle like this, which is to keep an eye out for these kind of squiggly. Little shapes on the bottom of a piece because you can match all those up and you can see that each one is actually half of a regular um in of a puzzle piece shape. So you can see that by finding all of those from all of the random piece’s number one I’ve cut down on the number of random pieces that are left and I’ve managed to get a whole bunch of pairs which will fit somewhere into this puzzle over here. I also sorted these out a little bit more, so you can see how like these are all kind of similar shapes. These are all the same.

These are the same. Here’s where I’m at when I’m stopping for lunch on day, two, I’m definitely making progress. Okay, so I just added up my time and I just hit 10 hours and 27 minutes, which means I officially will not be beating my time from the solid yellow puzzle. But you can see that I’m basically half well probably more than halfway done at this point and it’s definitely starting to go together a lot faster because there are just way fewer pieces left to choose from. So it’s about 3, 30.

Now and even though it took 10 hours to get to this point, I really feel like I can finish it in maybe another 90 minutes. Okay, I was right. I just filled in this piece and so now I can see the entire outline of that piece. It’s definitely the missing one because it would have been in this group or at least over by the random pieces, and it’s not there. So this is definitely the missing piece see.

I told you guys I’d be able to finish it today. It is 5 p.m. I have 27 pieces left, so this should be no problem to finish up all right here. It is the very last piece – oh my god, I’m so happy, I’m done with this puzzle.

That was a journey, a two-day puzzle journey. So my final time, according to my time sheet 12 hours and four minutes, but there were definitely times when I was like rearranging cameras when I was on the clock. So I’m just going to round down and say exactly 12 hours to finish this solid white puzzle and look as simony said in her video, there are definitely worse ways to spend 12 hours. Okay. So now I want to address the whole concept of missing puzzle pieces.

I am 100 sure that I would get so many more views and engagements if I came on here and was all angry and was like. Oh, my god, I can’t believe she would release a puzzle with a missing piece that is like sacrilegious to the entire concept of jigsaw puzzles like. Why would you release such an awful terrible puzzle but um here’s the truth missing pieces? Don’t really bother me. I know that sounds weird from someone who is a like professional puzzler, but for me the entire reason to do a puzzle is to put together the puzzle pieces like it’s about the act of constructing the puzzle.

I do so many puzzles that sometimes I barely even look at the finished image after I’m done like I get it if you bought a puzzle specifically to have on display and if that’s the case and you’re missing a piece, you can check out my video about How to make your own replacement puzzle piece but for a puzzle like this, where you know to expect a missing piece, and you know generally the part of the puzzle that it’s going to be. In I mean if you’ve watched her video or my video, then you would know that then it just becomes an extra challenge kind of similar to the impossible puzzles that have five extra pieces. I covered these on my channel a few months ago, or it’s also similar, to like hand, cut wooden puzzles that have cutouts in the design. I love it when puzzles, have an extra little twist like that to mix it up, so I am not mad at all. About the idea of selling a puzzle with a piece missing, I actually wish she had taken it like the next step further and truly made it a random piece from the puzzle so that you truly have no idea which piece it’s going to be.

That’s missing. So simony wanted to know if she had created the worst puzzle and I would say definitely not I mean I think we all know what the worst puzzle actually is, but this one has a solvable solution. It’s challenging, but not frustrating the pieces are really good quality. I didn’t have a single false fit the entire time that I was working on the puzzle, so I would say this is nowhere near being the worst puzzle. It’s actually a really good puzzle, and I think it is a great addition to the lexicon of solid colored puzzles.

If you don’t know, I happen to be a collector of solid colored puzzles, both vintage and modern. It’s a very um, specific collection. I have an entire video about all of the puzzles in that collection, but there’s one that I think this is the most similar to, and that is the spilt milk puzzle from the 80s. This one is also a solid white random cut puzzle with a gimmick um. This one is that the finished puzzle is in the shape of a puddle of spilled milk.

My biggest issue with this puzzle is that the pieces themselves are super low quality, so simony’s puzzle definitely wins in that aspect. However, if I compare this to the solid yellow puzzle that I just solved, there’s truly no contest like nothing can ever beat these vintage springbok puzzles from the 60s 70s and 80s. The pieces are super thick. The cut is really interesting; like they just don’t make puzzles like this anymore. Although a lot of the cut lines in simony’s puzzle reminded me so much of the cuts of the old springbok puzzles, you have the knobs being cut in half.

You have a ton of tiny, false edges and you have these wacky looking giant shapes. So I think that part of the reason why this white puzzle was relatively easy for me is because I was already familiar with a lot of those little tricks that the puzzle makers use when cutting random cut puzzles. So if you want to make simony’s puzzle easier for you, what you can do is get some easy. Vintage springbok puzzles put those together just to get used to how the piece shapes work together, and then you can graduate to the solid white puzzle once you’re. A little more familiar with all of these tricky little tricks and then, of course, blue kazoo, also released a solid white puzzle fairly.

Recently, you can see me solve the red one from this collection in this video. That’s where I have all of my best tips for how to do a solid colored puzzle or any difficult puzzle really, but the difference between these puzzles is that the blue kazoo one is a ribbon cut, which means it’s fully in a grid. It’s only like the standard piece shapes that you would expect, and this one is a thousand pieces, not 500, so this one is definitely much harder than simony’s puzzle and then probably the most well-known, solid colored puzzles are the crypt series from Ravensburger the silver one of These was actually the first solid colored puzzle I ever did. I have an entire video about that. It was um a bit of a struggle, but it might give you a more realistic idea of what to expect from this type of puzzle if you’ve never done a solid colored puzzle before so.

I’M not gonna lie, I’m going a little crazy. I was thinking about it and I think the feet. Video is still the worst thing I’ve ever done, but I think this puzzle might be the second worst thing. I’ve ever done. Okay, so here is the million-dollar question.

Well, the 50 question: once you add on shipping and taxes and everything is this puzzle worth 50, and I mean look if you are the type of puzzler who goes to target or Walmart once a year and picks up a puzzle for your family to do over Christmas, then, this is definitely a little much for you, but if you love interesting, puzzles and you’re looking for a new challenge, then definitely worth it. When a company comes out with like a one-off puzzle, you’re always gonna be worried that it’s gonna be a little bit garbage, but I’m really impressed this. One actually is a quality puzzle. So if you are brand new to my channel, I bet you didn’t know that someone could talk for this long about jigsaw puzzles. So let me know in a comment if this is the type of puzzle that you would want to try make sure that you hit that subscribe button for new puzzle, videos every Sunday and your code word for the comments to prove that you watched all the way to the end of the video will be missing, oh and then I had one last thought before I go so simony is having all of the missing pieces sent to her by the manufacturer.

Do you think if I ask really really nicely do you think she might give me one so that she and I can have the only complete copies of this puzzle in existence? I don’t know I’ll ask her all right, I’m gonna, let you all go bye.

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