Lovely hand-cut puzzle from Fool’s Gold in New Hampshire. Beautiful packaging — box, puzzle reveal photo in a nice little bag, instructions on measuring the puzzle (with a puzzle-assembled ruler) to test whether your assemblage was correct or “forced” ….
The shiny bag material in which the puzzle was shared is so familiar to me … I realize if it’s probably not literally the same fabric that I used to craft a superhero cape for one of my child’s Halloween costumes years ago …. it’s probably not, but still! I love to imagine that my worlds might have connected in such small and miraculous ways! At the least, it triggered a happy memory.
The puzzle pieces themselves were quite beautiful — solid wood with a veneer, which is a bit different than a plywood. (I worry about the mahogany veneer — is it FSC-certified?) The pieces have a lovely feel — polished, but not too polished — not so polished they hide the woodiness.
The puzzle. I loved assembling the frame, and the individual butterflies, which were all traditional jigsaw puzzling assembly — pattern and cut matching. The interior is where it gets tough. There are many drop-outs in the cut, so no easy cut matching. Instead, it becomes a bit of a logic-puzzle challenge (how best to fit these various disparate geometric shapes into one space) with a few jigsaw puzzle-like piece matches. There’s no pattern matching here, or very little, because the image is a collage rather than a continuous image, so the pieces are best described as color-line cut. So this is very Stave-like.
Okay, I confess — I assembled the left half of the interior, then, (excuses excuses) I was really frazzled, exhausted, and not up for a full challenge, so I looked at the solution for the second half of the interior. (It was “left half, right half” as I assembled it, but in figure 7 below, it’s bottom-half, top-half.) I had assembled one of the five similar blue butterflies backwards, but nothing else. The other half I had some pieces fitting in, but not the whole thing.
Okay, look, it’s just a puzzle! I do it for self-soothing — looking at the solution is not cheating or harming anyone else. /self-granted expiation
Anyway, beautiful. I loved it, and am looking for more from this puzzle cutter.
(Hey, wood puzzle cutters. As a copyright counseling-attorney type person to creators, I do ponder effects of trading clubs and secondary markets on your ability to make a sustainable profit off this creative endeavor. But, from a purely anecdotal perspective, the Hoefnagel Wooden Puzzle Club has turned me onto handcut puzzles, which my librarian-level income (and my interests in spending it) would never otherwise have supported. And I, in turn, have turned quite a few people onto wooden puzzling (with handcut puzzles sure to eventually come, for some). Anecdotal, sure, but my anti-exceptionalism rule suggests to me that it is more likely that I am typical than atypical. Like libraries, I suspect that Hoefnagel not only supports the growth of the wood puzzle genre (hobby?) as a whole, but also the hand-carved puzzles as well. Surely an interesting economics paper could be written.
