My oldest puzzle yet! Solving a mysterious wooden puzzle from the 1940s

Foreign hi everyone and welcome to the annual Karen puzzles holiday special, so the puzzle that I chose for this year’s Christmas. Video uh is not a Christmas puzzle, but I just thought it would be super cozy to put together in front of the Christmas tree. So this box came all the way from Finland. Can you see that it says Helsinki right there and inside this box is a very special vintage puzzle? Also inside is a bar of nice European chocolate, so this was all sent to me from a viewer named Luca.

So big, thank you to Lucas for making this video happen and sending me this puzzle and for uh sending me a snack but okay. The puzzle is from Sweden from the 1940s and there’s no picture on here of what it’s going to look like. So this is a total mystery to me, Luca very specifically said in their email that they weren’t going to send me a picture of the finished puzzle so that I truly would have no idea what I was going to be making. So here is a closer look at the box. If you speak Swedish, some of these words probably mean something to you right here.

You can see the name of the company ET Arista spell sorry. I should not have even attempted that here on the side, you can see that it is 600 pieces and then this right here fiscalage, I’m probably saying that totally wrong, and I apologize to all of my Swedish listeners, Luca told me in their email that that means Old fishing Village, so I guess I have a little bit of a clue of what we’re getting into what else did Luca say. Let’S see, uh the puzzle is going to be missing. One piece and another piece are broken in half so I’ll have to keep an eye out for that. So I’m not sure if I already said this, but this puzzle is actually a wooden puzzle.

Look at how beautiful that is and look at how interesting all of these piece shapes are they’re all like super squiggly like that, so I guess initially looking through this, I’m seeing a lot of blue I’m seeing a lot of green and then honestly, I can’t even Tell like what the image of this puzzle is really gon na look like so I’m gon na get started on this puzzle in just a sec, but first, let’s hear from today’s sponsor and trust me, you guys are gon na. Be super excited about this one. I am so so that today’s video is sponsored by Diamond Art Club, so they sponsored another one of my videos a little while ago and you guys were all so into it. There is a huge overlap between puzzlers and Diamond painters. So if you don’t know Diamond painting is a way to make colorful shimmery artwork, you get everything that you need in the kit.

So when you peel back the film, you can see all these different symbols, so you’re just gon na select the one that you want to work on and match that up with the included rhinestones. So you pour these rhinestones into the tray and then you press the included applicator into the wax, and you use that to pick them up. And then you just place the diamonds onto the adhesive canvas. It’S sort of like paint by numbers only a whole lot more sparkly, so they let me pick which one I wanted to do this time and I went with abstract cat, which is so fun because you have all these tiny little colorful sections that are so satisfying To fill in, they sent this to me two months ago and I have genuinely been working on it every single day. Since I got it, it is the perfect thing to do for like 20 minutes over lunch and just have a Mindless satisfying activity to keep your hands busy and clear your head exactly like a jigsaw puzzle and at the end you get this super sparkly piece of Artwork like look at it when the light shines right on it.

It is so beautiful. So when they sent this to me, I was like you guys. Don’T also have to send me a finished one like I’m gon na finish it myself and sure enough. I’M almost done, all that’s left is this top corner, so I am officially a diamond painting convert and these also make great gifts for the holidays. Since everything you need is included in the box.

So right now you can save 20% off your first purchase with a diamond Art Club just go to diamondartclub.com, puzzles and use the promo code puzzles20, and I’m also gon na put all of that info down in the video description. Thank you all right. So I’m 18 minutes in and, as you can see, I started by sorting all of the blue pieces and all of the green pieces, and then I have two trays with all of the brown pieces um there is some detail like I feel, like that’s going to Be a boat, maybe this stripe, that’s also going to be a boat, but I really can’t tell quite yet also I just got these trays on Amazon pretty recently. If you want to get the same ones, I’m going to put the link down below, and I also got this timer on Amazon.

I’Ve had a few questions about that. So I’ll put the link to this down below as well. So I’ve definitely noticed a bit of damage like some of the paper is peeling up. There’S also this piece where a big chunk of the picture is just entirely missing, but I guess that’s probably to be expected for a puzzle. That is from the 1940s, so that would be 80 years old by now.

That’S so wild that these pieces were cut out 80 years ago. So, okay, these are the first two pieces I found that go together and it’s kind of a loose fit which is going to be tricky as I’m. You know going at this having no idea what I’m even putting together there’s also it looks like gon na be quite a few pieces. I mean that doesn’t go there, but quite a few pieces where they just fully don’t lock together. So that’s gon na be fun.

Maybe it’s this one nope, also not that one. Maybe this one goes like that um. Does that light up, yeah? I think that lines up, I’m gon na say that’s right. Thank you all right.

So we are an hour in and we’re really starting to see what the picture looks like. Look at that nice, big section that I’ve put together, so we can clearly see that there’s some sort of body of water with these sailboats in it. This is where I started with the puzzle, and it looks like it’s some sort of like we’re looking through something towards the ocean, so I’m not sure how that’s gon na fit in. I would love to get this corner finished and I actually just spotted that which I’m pretty sure slots in here second ago. This is really hard to do.

One-Handed there we go um. One thing you might have noticed is that these pieces, like with the slightest nudge, just love to come apart, so normally I would do a puzzle like this on this felt board that I have so that there is a lot more friction and grip between the pieces And the board, as opposed to like a piece of foam board like this, which is perfectly smooth. However, I did not know how big the finished puzzle was. Gonna be – and I didn’t want to get a lot of it done and then have to move it off of the smaller felt board onto a larger piece of foam board. So I decided to just do it on the foam board and we’re just gon na have to deal with pieces of wanting to come apart from each other.

So I’m having such a great time with this, I actually put on a 1940 leaves and music playlist on Spotify just to really get in the mood, and it has been so calming and cozy um granted. I don’t know how much of that music they were listening to in Sweden in the 1940s, but I figured it was close enough. Okay, however um I am gon na make one change right now so sitting on the floor, like leaning over this ottoman is uh extremely uncomfortable. My feet keep falling asleep. My back is already getting sore, so I think I’m gon na set up the cards table right here and then sit in an actual chair so that I can finish this up without my entire body hurting tomorrow, because I am not 16 anymore.

Are there days where I could sit on the floor, leaning over a puzzle? Thank you all right. So it’s been a little over another hour, so we’re at two hours and 16 minutes and I’ve definitely made progress, but I still have not made it to either of the other Corners. So I still don’t know how big this thing is gon na be so I discovered that there’s actually a little house right here. You can see the roof and then I’ve been filling in this land over here.

I’ve also been pulling all of these pieces with this yellow stripe, which I assume makes up some kind of rowboat. I still can’t really tell if it’s a boat or a dock or something else, this piece is driving me crazy. I cannot find it and I just keep reminding myself that there is one piece missing. So if there is a piece that I truly cannot find, that might be the piece I also um, while I’m here just wanted to talk about my Christmas decorations very quickly, because I did not go all out this year, like I usually do. If you’ve seen some of my previous um Christmas posts, you know that I usually have a giant white tree like a full-size white tree that I put up and I decorate um this year.

There are puzzles on literally every single surface of my living room. I have no room for the big tree, so instead I had to just pull out my little cardboard tree, which was a DIY for HGTV back when I worked for them. These paper trees were also a DIY back when I was with HGTV and these stockings. I just made it for fun last year, but that’s basically the extent of my Christmas decorations this year and here’s the other problem. So when I rearranged the closet in the studio earlier this year, I had my big Christmas box at the bottom, like in the corner underneath my bunch of stuff – and I was like it’s fine – I don’t need it for months by the time.

It’S Christmas time. I can just move stuff and I can get it out well, it’s Christmas time and that box is like fully tetris’d into the closet. I cannot get it out without moving, like literally everything in the closet, so instead I just have my smaller Christmas box, which was out in the garage and that’s where I got the ornaments for this tree, but I have no tinsel. I like barely any of my usual decorations, so I just had to resign myself to having a much smaller Christmas setup this year, but anyway, I think I have another hour where I can work on this today. Um, I’m also gon na start digging into this massive chocolate bar that Luca sent me.

I think it’s time for a little snack. Oh that’s! So good all right enough chocolate enough Christmas. Let’S get back to the puzzle! Oh yes!

Oh my gosh! I found it. I found out that I’m at about three and a half hours in for the day and I think I’m gon na wait until tomorrow to finish it, but look I have made it all the way down to the other corner. So now I know exactly how big this is going to be, so you can see that I made my way down from this water to this bridge, and then we have this boat with all of those yellow lines and from there I connected it down to this Kind of dark area. I actually think this might be the water under the bridge, so those might somehow connect, and then this is going to be somewhere along the bottom Edge.

I thought at first that it connected like right here, but it turns out it doesn’t, but I’m having a great time with this puzzle. This is such a difference from last week for day two: let’s go ahead and finish this up, so that I can get my living room back. It is a beautiful sunny day here in LA, and I just can’t get over how nice this puzzle looks like in the sunlight for being 80 years old. This is in such good shape. Oh my gosh literally two seconds into looking at this puzzle, and I found my first piece so that is actually going to connect up here, which means I have to very carefully move these three pieces and then very carefully move that batch of pieces and then just Slot that in right there – oh that looks so nice and then this should be pretty easy to find.

That should be pretty easy to find. Let’S get back to it. Thank you. Thank you, Christmas sweater. What do you guys think of me actually wearing color in this video, so I am at just under five hours, and here is all of the progress that I’ve made.

As you can see this morning, I filled in um pretty much this entire corner, so you can see that they’re, actually, all these little houses up here, um these colorful pieces that at first I thought were going to be boats. That’S actually laundry hanging out, and then we have a few colorful people dotted in there. It’S actually really interesting for me to step back and look at the whole thing now, because when I was working on it, I was so focused on just these different textures and the color that I honestly like didn’t. Even look at the entire picture of what I was putting together so as you can see, I have two pieces that I cannot find, but Luca told me in their email that there’s only one missing piece, so one of them has to be around here somewhere or Both of them and like the missing piece could be somewhere else, so that’s driving me a little bit crazy. I also keep building these kinds of large sections which are such a pain to move, so I basically just have to like to move all of these, so that they’re basically in place and then finish filling in the bottom of the puzzle.

I think I can finally be done with the tray and just move all of the pieces onto the board, since I keep having to like lift that up to see what’s underneath, but I am loving this. This is such a fun challenge, even though it is taking. You know five hours, they are a much more enjoyable five hours than the puzzle I did last week. I did it. I finished it so that it took me five hours and 20 minutes in total, which I think is pretty good for having all of these crazy piece shapes and having no idea what I was putting together.

I loved putting this one together and I don’t know exactly how many uh vintage wooden puzzles. There are from Sweden in the 1940s out there for sale, but if you can get your hands on one um highly recommended. So, just as I thought, this blue circle, which I had started with, is in fact the water underneath the bridge and over here is our missing puzzle piece. It’S too bad that it’s in such a complicated area, because if it was like solid blue, it would be a whole lot easier to recreate. So I don’t know if I myself am going to be attempting to repaint what’s missing, but I had the idea what, if we let Photoshop have a try at it, so I’m gon na load it in and then do content aware, fill and uh we’re just gonNa see what happens, but if any of you out there are actual artists, um I’ll, put a high quality image of the missing piece down in the description.

So if you want a quick little challenge feel free to try to fill it in yourself and then right down here you can see the piece that was cracked in half. So if you look at these other pieces in the row, you can see that they’re all a full shape, and then this one has that split in the middle honestly, it’s not a big deal, though it’s just like there’s an extra piece in the puzzle. You know to make up for the one that’s missing so okay, I have three more observations about this puzzle number one. It says here in the corner printed in England, which is kind of interesting, since this puzzle was released in Sweden. Number two look at these fun Whimsy pieces, so we have a swan.

Here’S a cute little bear, okay. I wanted to show a third example, but I’m only seeing two animals in this puzzle, but either way it just adds so much more like fun and personality to this hand, cut puzzle, and then the third thing I wanted to point out are these little holes throughout The puzzle, they almost look like someone shoved a thumbtack through them, but the holes go all the way to the back like it’s not just through the paper. It’S all the way through the wood, here’s another one or you can see that it goes all the way through so they’re pretty evenly spaced. My first theory was that someone had maybe tried to hang this on the wall like and just put nails through it, but these pieces do not lock together, so I don’t think that would be possible. Maybe it somehow kept the wood in place while they were cutting it.

I really don’t know if anyone has any ideas or anything series feel free to leave them down in the comments, but I think that’s all I’ve got for this puzzle, but I did just want to give you a little update on my diamond painting. I actually finished it last night. I had so much fun with this and I’m so happy that diamond Art Club is sponsoring this video, because this was like a project that I genuinely enjoyed and worked on for like two months and if you’re looking to get into even more of a festive mood. I’ll link last year’s Karen puzzles holiday special right down below. In that one I solved the solid colored spilled milk puzzle, and got it like Santa’s milk and cookies. That one was maybe a little bit more related to Christmas than this one was, but all right.

Your code word for the comments will be Sweden and bonus points if you are actually in Sweden right now and like triple bonus points. If you were alive in the 1940s and you lived in Sweden and can give me some more information about this puzzle, all right. Happy Holidays, happy puzzling and I will see you all in the next video