This is a beautiful hand-cut, hand-painted puzzle by Terra Rodgers (Chestnut and Hemlock). I got it from Hoefnagel, and liked it so well I ordered one for keeps.
The puzzle is TINY — about 6″ diameter, 117 pieces — and the consistent curvey shapes, and individually painted pieces, made it a challenge. It’s all shape work! Nuances of this spiral versus that one, or the shapes of the “double butt” shape as I call them. Also, in almost all cases you could use color to rule out some colors, because colors were not adjacent to identical colors. (I think I found one tiny join exception with yellow.) There are five colors — purple, blue, pink, orange, and yellow — but there is some variation, in that there are a couple of different shades of purple in this one. There are indeed sparkles – they are faint and tasteful. (-:
“Sparkles All Around” kept me working hard for quite a few hours while life was chaotic all around me, so I consider it a therapeutic bargain for the bang.
I also loved that Terra described it as “apple ply”, and you could see the layers of ply (picture below) — it gave me a deeper sense of the wood itself, than I usually get even from wooden puzzles. The packaging included apple-green tissue paper which was either a lovely coincidence or was perhaps coincidentally with apple-green tissue paper. Photos below of the packaging, which was delightful, and my fingers and spoon for perspective on size.
