Publisher: Re-Marks, Inc.
Time Taken: 3 h 6 minutes
Number of Pieces: 500
This is 2/3s of my recent puzzle haul from Amazon. I decided to do the one on the right first as I had been eyeing it since its release years ago. I had been putting off buying it for so long because I needed to use a US forwarder to ship the puzzles to Brunei through Fedex (the local post office had lost enough of my parcels in the past to give me pause), and the shipping estimate made me wince. In light of recent developments, though, I felt I deserved to indulge myself and this was the perfect pick-me-up. No time like the present, right?
It’s my first puzzle from Re-Marks, and I’m very pleased with it. The image is endearing, the print is good quality, there is minimal dust, and the pieces have clean edges. It was also my first time working with irregularly shaped pieces, but the image sections and details are distinct enough that there’s virtually no risk of false fits. There’s a medium-sized folded insert of the image enclosed in the box for reference.
The theme of the puzzle is the Lunar New Year of the Rabbit. It’s an illustrated snapshot of a lagomorph enthusiast’s living space, featuring an assortment of various objects liberally adorned with rabbits. Bunnies everywhere! Now that’s my kind of puzzle. I find it so relatable because, like in the puzzle, I own so many things with rabbits printed on them, it would probably be easier to list down things I own that don’t have rabbits on them than the ones that do. Sometimes I wonder if the handymen who come into my room to fix things judge me for it 🙂
Here are some pictures of the finished product and some close-ups:
It was interesting to see that my Mr Hops apparently modelled for the cover of this edition of the Rabbits magazine.
This is Mr Hops for reference. (He’s collapsed from hunger here. Poor boy hadn’t eaten anything for all of ten minutes.)
Here’s a close-up of one of the pieces. Is it just me, or are the bold outlines and stippled appearance giving Roy Lichtenstein?
This is what it looked like at the half-hour mark:
This is after two hours:
After completing the puzzle, I snapped a few photos and then disassembled and packed it back in the box. I did that because upon further reflection, it felt like my initial excitement had been gradually eclipsed by the compulsion to finish at least one personal project and appease my inner completionist. I decided a do-over was in order before committing to the finality of gluing and framing it.
Fast forward to exactly one week after the first completed attempt. I got a Coffee Bean iced latte after work, sat down in the study, and got to business. I ended up doing the puzzle 1.25 times during this second attempt.
How does one do a puzzle 1.25 times in one sitting, you ask? Well, after I successfully completed the puzzle, I stood up, admired it, and put some finishing touches to prepare it for framing. I patted down the puzzle to secure loosely fitted pieces and then pushed the opposing sides and corners in toward the centre to lock the pieces in tighter. I guess I underestimated how tenuously the pieces were connected (or rather, overestimated the force required for such an undertaking), and the puzzle imploded before I even blinked.
Both the left and right edges of the puzzle remained intact, but the entire middle column from top to bottom disintegrated and scattered pieces inches away from their original position and on the floor and under furnitures. So, I got on the floor, picked up the pieces, and did a reconstruction speed-run of the missing section. To my horror, there were at least 10 pieces still missing when I was done, which took another 5 minutes to hunt down. Also, when I transferred the puzzle to another surface to apply glue to my manila card, the bottom edge broke off again. The puzzle gods were having a little too much fun messing with me, but I finally managed to finally fit and glue everything together in the end.
Lastly, someone asked if I had counted the number of bunnies in the puzzle, so I decided to give it a go and counted 49 bun-buns. 49 seems so arbitrary though.
I decided to include a shot with some of my own bunny-themed things for fun. Puzzle-ception!
It took me a few years to finally buy this puzzle and finish it, but it was a real treat. My next one is the other puzzle with two rabbits floating down the river in a coconut husk!