The hardest puzzle I’ve done yet

Why do I? Why do I keep doing this myself? Why, but how necessary? Is it really for me to finish this one welcome to my um. True mental breakdown hi everyone.

So, as you all will probably know by now, I love jigsaw puzzles. I mean clearly considering the puzzle that I designed today. I wanted to reach back into my vintage puzzle collection and solve two puzzles that I think fit into this category, but in slightly different ways, we’ve got puzzle plus by Eaton, which is all of these. Like big graphics, different colored puzzle pieces, this is basically like easy mode of The Puzzler by Springbok, but then we’ve also got a jigsaw puzzle by CR Gibson, get it, get it, it’s a jigsaw puzzle. It says jigsaw puzzle and it’s a jigsaw puzzle.

Why do I think this is like the funniest weirdest puzzle image I’ve ever seen, so I’ve done a bunch of research on this one to find out like where it came from I’m gonna get to that later in the video first, let’s start with the Eaton Puzzle, it came out in 1982 and it is from the company Eaton which, as I’ve talked about on this channel before we’re, putting out puzzles that were very similar to what Springbok was doing at the time, like literally, if I put these boxes next to each other. You can see that they are basically the exact same size. Looking at the sides of the boxes, you can see that they both have this fun typography on the side, however, while Springbok um had these fun poems on the back, if we look at the back of the Eaton box um, you can see the puzzle cut, which Is kind of interesting, I don’t think they do that on all of their boxes, but there is no poem Justice for the puzzle. Poems I want more puzzle poems, one is a modern company gonna bring back the puzzle poems. Also you can see that these pieces look very similar to the Springbok pieces. I just grabbed a piece off of the Springbok puzzle, so you can see that uh.

They look very similar to each other. Look at what they’re, even basically the exact same thickness of cardboard, so I’m gonna get started solving this one in just a sec. But first I wanted to take a minute to tell you about today’s sponsor. So we are coming up on the holidays and if you are still looking for a perfect puzzle gift puzzle, U is here to save the day. You can either upload your own photos and make a custom puzzle or you can browse through their collection of over 25 000 different images and get any of those made into a puzzle from 48 to 2000 pieces.

I decided to go with a Christmas theme, so I got this puzzle of all of these fun Christmas cookies. This is a thousand pieces and it was so fun to do next to my Christmas tree with all the Christmas lights on, it was super festive. So here is the finished puzzle and the pieces are really nice quality um, it’s super matte, so you don’t get any kind of glare or shininess and, as you can see, they have every standard type of piece shape. A lot of these custom puzzles. Companies will only do the like two in two out piece shapes but uh.

Not this one look it’s. It looks like any other standard, regular puzzle that you can buy and then, in addition to this puzzle with one of their like ready-made images, I also got a custom photo puzzle with festive pictures of my sister and I so what I was most impressed by for This one was the collage templates, the ones on puzzle. U are actually really well designed and it makes for an easier puzzle since you have more different colorful elements to put together. So if you’re still looking for the perfect puzzle gift uh, I have a promo code for you. You can save at 20 on any puzzle.

Just use 20 Karen P at checkout at puzzleu.com and the discount will be applied and it is valid from right now through December 31st, for all of the countries that I’ve listed on screen. Oh man, I’m so excited to start working on this puzzle. This has been on my wish list for so long. I can’t believe I get to solve it today, but one thing I just noticed: it says that the puzzle size is 18 by 24, which is a rectangle, but the box is a square and even on the back like this is a square so in which direction Is the design going to extend or get cut off?

I have no idea, I guess I guess we’re about to find out. Also, do you remember what happened uh? The last time I did an eaten puzzle. Eight eight missing pieces. This time I got this puzzle uh directly from a viewer named Ken, so hopefully, hopefully there aren’t any missing pieces, but again, there’s only one way to find out and start.

Thank you. Thank you all right, so I am an hour and 21 minutes into it, and I’ve already like halfway done with this puzzle. Just as I expected once, I got all of the yellow white and orange pieces done, everything connected, and now I can really see where the outlines are gonna be so what is next, I mean the first thing is to not drop a piece on the floor. So I guess I could do all of the red pieces. I think that probably stands out the most and then probably blue after that, and then from there.

This dark green. This really dark blue and the brown um there should be few enough pieces left that I can just kind of do them all simultaneously, but I’m loving this puzzle. I love this random piece cut. The fact that the image is easy enough makes it super fun to just discover all of these like weird random random pieces and how they fit together, and I have not looked at the box once this entire time, like I’m. Truly just doing it by uh by the pieces, if you guys remember the video where I solved The Puzzler puzzle uh this one is definitely so much easier. Thank you.

Oh man, what a fun quick little puzzle so in total that took me an hour 54.40 and look at how solid this thing is like. I can literally pick it up and drop it and it’s totally fine, let’s see if I can flip it. Ah, there we go it’s so solid, oh my gosh, I love old puzzles like this, and I did an eaten puzzle and I wasn’t missing any pieces and to answer the question of in which direction the design is getting extended. It looks like this piece is the same as this piece, so we have the yellow and then the orange, so it basically is like this and then yeah as it wraps around the side of the Box.

Um. Actually, that’s pretty exact, yeah. This side of the box is an act, oh wait! No, not on this Edge, um yeah, it looks like there’s gonna be another two inches or so of the design. That’S getting cut off on this side of the box.

So I’m just so happy that I have this one and that I was able to solve it, but next it is time to take on the jigsaw puzzle, jigsaw puzzle. I definitely think this one will be a little bit harder um, because you have the top third of the image with this text, which will be easy enough, but then the entire bottom two-thirds is just this grid with nothing else happening. So I’m gonna take a little break and then I’ll get back to it. This afternoon, oh man, oh man, wish me luck all right. I’Ve had lunch.

I took a little break and now I am ready to tackle the jigsaw puzzle. So I got this puzzle from a viewer named Liam um. He just emailed me with a photo of it and I was like I’ve never heard of this puzzle before I’ve never seen this before. I need it for my collection. So where did this come from?

Luckily, there’s a lot of information on the sides and the back of the box to give us a bunch of Clues, so you can see here that the company name is CR Gibson. You can see it over here as well. So CR Gibson is a paper goods company which has been around since 1870. 

So I was trying to figure out what year this puzzle was from at first. I didn’t think there was a year on the box, but then I realized that the year is actually right here in Roman numerals.

So when you translate that into regular numbers, it is from 1977. and it seems like another view, is the jigsaw puzzle line released by CR Gibson in the 70s. I looked it up on worthpoint and I found a bunch of other puzzle designs with the exact same box design again for the most part, very similar images to what Springbok and Eaton and other puzzle companies were doing in the 70s. But look at this tennis, one that I found that is such a cool photo that one is definitely going on. My vintage puzzle wish list, so the box for this one you can see, is a rectangle, not a square, but it’s still kind of a similar box design as what the other companies were doing.

You can see how the title of the puzzle is in just some fun typography there on the side and when you look at the other puzzles released by them, each title is in a different font, which is the same thing that Springbok was doing now. There’S another clue that I wanted to dig into. It says that this is from the Pam marker collection, so I tried Googling Pam marker collection and that does not exist on the internet, but instead I tried just Pam marker and I found this trademark for a logo which was active in the 80s and again it Is linked to paper goods just like this CR Gibson company? Interestingly, it says that Pam marker was a real person and in some of the search results I did see an obituary for a Pamela marker. I don’t know if that is the same person or not.

Just wasn’t any direct information connecting them, but whoever she was, it seems like she would do illustrations for things like napkins and invitations and paper plates uh back in the 80s. So maybe this was an early design of hers before she started getting into the like paper goods designs. I would love to know more information about where this design came from, whose idea was like why they went with this font, this layout, this like brown graph paper in the background, it’s just so weird and random right. Unfortunately, the information about this specific puzzle is uh. Pretty sparse, so if we look at the back of the box, we get this little paragraph of some fun copying.

You appreciate a new approach, a challenge right. The concept of another viewer having a mind was developed or I did not read like a horoscope. You start Trends, you never follow them anyway. I don’t think that is specific to this puzzle design. I think they had the same um box back of the box design for all of their puzzles, and then there was just one more piece of information that I wanted to dig into, which is that this was produced in Norwalk Connecticut.

So I cross-referenced that, with the other images that I found and on the back of this box of invitations from the 80s, there is actually an address in Connecticut. So, of course, I had to plug that in to see what was there and when I went to street view, would you look at that? A beautiful entryway that says CR Gibson that is so satisfying to find. So I don’t know if they’re still there. I kind of doubt it, but that building definitely used to be their offices.

And do you guys remember when I was trying to track down information on the Lawson and Lawson puzzle company from uh Wilton Connecticut? I still haven’t made a ton of Headway on that one, but it’s just funny that there are so many puzzle companies from Connecticut, like I wonder if they knew each other. I wonder if they were active at the same time anyway. I hope you enjoyed all of that research stuff. I got into this puzzle, but now I think it’s time I think I need to actually start solving this puzzle.

This is just like one step up from a solid colored puzzle like I’m pretty sure this is gonna be a lot more difficult than the first one. Thank you so much harder than I thought so, I’m currently at an hour 51, which is the amount of time it took to do the entire last puzzle, and this is how much I have finished, and it’s only gonna get worse from here, because now the Rest is all the exact same texture, so why is this so difficult? Well, these piece shapes are so wacky, like literally, nothing goes where you think it’s gonna go. There isn’t a single normally shaped piece in here, like everything is just so incredibly random cut, and so it just made it. I don’t know, it’s just so difficult to figure out, so you can see that over here I have a bunch of edge pieces. I’m over here I have all the rest of the pieces. I think I’m gonna try to get the rest of the edge finished today, but I really think this is going to be a two day puzzle like I don’t think I’m gonna finish.

All of this all in one day, this is so much puzzling for one day. Okay, I really didn’t think this was going to be this difficult. Why do I keep it? Why do I keep doing this myself? Why is it almost Christmas?

I meant to pick an easy puzzle and instead I picked this – I’m not gonna lie. This has become the type of puzzle where I look at it and I’m like, but how necessary? Is it really for me to finish this? One sew The Edge honestly was not any trouble at all. I put that together super quickly, but now it is just all of these random shapes that I have to fill in like two-thirds of the puzzle, which is probably about 300 pieces, and like I just it’s it’s taking so long, and I I don’t know I I Don’T know, am I gonna finish this?

I honestly don’t know so. I’Ve tried a couple strategies like I pulled a bunch of pieces that have a really tiny connector, because most of them have really big ones and so the little ones I knew I could pair together. So I got a couple good pairs out of that. I honestly looked at this where someone spilled or something got a little stained here in the corner, and I was honestly looking for those pieces, even though that’s kind of cheating, but at this point I do not care. This piece is driving me crazy.

I cannot find it. I swear. I’Ve tried every single piece that even slightly resembles it and it is not here. I even tried to separate them by piece of shape, so I pulled out all of these kinds of standard puzzle pieces. However, there are literally seven of them and every single other.

Their piece is just this wacky random shape, so it’s impossible to sort by piece shape. Something I was thinking was. I could basically align all of the pieces so that the lines are going in um. Like are exactly horizontal and vertical instead of being on the diagonal, and then I would at least know like the orientation, even if it’s like flipped that way, I would know it’s either that way, or that way I don’t know, is that gonna work is that gonna help me at all I’ve been working on this for over three hours now because uh earlier, when I was working on the edge, I forgot to turn the timer back on for like 10 minutes. So I’m probably at like three hours and 10 minutes which isn’t too bad for a puzzle, but I can just see there being like another six hours of staring at this grid and I don’t know if I can do it i’m all right, that’s gonna, be It for today I’m gonna sleep on it and then I will decide in the morning if I want to spend another day staring at all of these pieces.

Okay, let’s see how much damage I can do today. There has to be a better way to sort these, though oh my gosh, I got my first piece of the day. Okay, so that’s the one that was driving me crazy and now I know exactly what to look for is that it is uh close and not quite right. Oh my God. Oh my God!

Oh my God! Oh my God, I found it. I’m so happy. I found it. Yes, okay, I can finally move on guys, of course, I’m back for day two. I can’t not finish this puzzle.

Who do you think I am, somebody who doesn’t finish things, so I refuse to believe that there is a puzzle that cannot be sorted and I think I’ve started making some good progress. So this might still look incredibly messy, but I swear it is actually organized. So up here we have these pieces that just have one in and nothing else going on. Then we have the pieces with just one out and no other like full ins or outs. Then we have the pieces with an out on each side but nothing specific on the top or bottom.

Then we have the pieces with an out on one side and in on the other side and again nothing on the top or bottom. Then we have the pieces with one single corner here like two full outs and then the corner between them. Over. Here we have the pieces with three fallouts and the corners between them. Then we have two outs with a corner plus one in we have just ins and no outs at all.

We have an out and an in kind of next to each other with other stuff going on on the other side of the piece we have the standard piece shapes plus the ones that have like the top of the standard piece shape. We have these guys that look kind of like a like a triangle with outs on either side with an in between them and then down here we have all of the random pieces. I mean the ones that look the most standard in this puzzle fit into the random category, because there’s nothing else to pair with it, but this many random pieces is way more manageable than when all of them were mixed up together. So using all of this organization, I actually managed to find this piece relatively quickly, because I knew I was looking for a wing and I knew it probably wasn’t going to be one of these guys because I that would be too obvious. So I had to find one where the lines were perpendicular to the top of the sum of this out, and then it had this kind of standard shaped wing and I found it now.

I just have to do that over and over and over again 300 times to fill in the entire puzzle. It is 9am. Now I’m really really hoping that I can finish this today. Oh my God! Oh my God!

Why why? Why? Why? Why why? Why that’s the question in the video just why I hate myself so much?

Why am I still doing this? Why can’t I stop okay, so we are now at uh, six and a half hours, so I did another three hours this morning and I’ve put in a handful of pieces. Maybe, like I don’t know, 25 pieces the entire morning and like it shouldn’t be this hard, like this shape right here with this um kind of Curt like this sharp corner. That should be easy to find and I’ve gone over all of the pieces and I’m just not seeing it like. Where is it?

I don’t see it the same as this one. That’S driving me crazy. I cannot find this connector. Although wait. Wait, hang on, hang on.

I just had a brainstorm – maybe maybe this isn’t connected to that. Maybe it’s like. Maybe it’s one of these that is not okay, it’s close, though. Oh my God, okay, no, oh my God! This is what I’m talking about.

I can’t, I can’t stop. I can’t walk away. I can’t stop. All morning I kept getting stuck for like 20 minutes at a time and I’d be all right. I’M just gonna end it here, I’m not doing this anymore and then I would get you know two or three pieces and I would get re-energized and be like well or maybe a few more pieces like I even just, went and took a lunch break and I was sitting on the couch for like 10 minutes and then I was like I’m bored, I’m ready to get back to the puzzle.

What else am I gonna do? Welcome to my um, true mental breakdown. Even now, as I’m having a mental breakdown, I’m looking at the puzzle and being like oh where’s that piece – oh, I bet I can find that piece. Oh my God, thanks Liam thanks for making this happen, Liam, okay, okay, no! No! I’M gonna!

I’m gonna keep working on it all afternoon, I’m gonna Keep. If I don’t finish it today, then I’ll stop but okay. Now, let’s, let’s get back to it! Thank you! Oh my God.

Even with the last two pieces, I still don’t know how they go in there. We go all right. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. I can’t believe I finished, you know, that wasn’t so bad. I’m glad I didn’t get over dramatic about it or anything. So my final time, oh my gosh, my final time, oh, are you guys ready? Are you ready, 10 hours and six minutes?

Why? Why can I never walk away from a puzzle? Why do I like to sit here and finish it and just look at some of these piece shapes like that is so wild that is wacky. This is honestly one of the most difficult puzzles I have ever done. So it’s like five o’clock.

Now it’s already getting dark out. I basically spent an entire nine to five work day. Working solely on this puzzle anyway, remember to check out the puzzle. U, the sponsors of this video, the promo code and all the info will be down in the description uh. Let me know in the comments.

What is a task that seemed insurmountable that you almost gave up on, but you persevered and you made it through or tell me like, would you have stuck this one out? Would you have solved this one? I’m your code word for the comments will be uh grid. I don’t know I’m happy puzzling. Thank you for watching this madness. I don’t even know what this video was a bit of everything.

You got some puzzle history. You got an easy puzzle. You got a hard puzzle, you got to watch me cry and laugh when I should be crying all right. I’M gonna go