L2 - Puzzles

Our puzzles take about an hour to put together….

We have a series of collections of different puzzles… Trains, Mary Robert's 1850 "Voices from the Woodlands", Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine 1800s Fashion, Kohler's Medicinal botanical prints, Early 1900s Baseball Cards, Kate Greenway's 1889 Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. (these will be added later).

Sonora No. 7

The Puzzle Reinvented - How we make ours.

We went back to the basics of puzzle making from the last two centuries to recapture the spirit of the craft and brought it up to speed with new techniques for enhancing the imagery, improving the cutting technique, and reducing the overall waste and environmental impact. Each is handmade in our shop.

Our puzzle designs are as unique as the name Lumenaris itself, our images, for example, come from a wide variety of interesting sources, including many that are based on hand-colored engravings dating back to the 1700s, antique paintings, drawings, illustrations, and even photographs. We take great care and consideration in handling this original artwork to reproduce it onto our puzzles.

We use a special technique that allows us to transfer the image onto high-quality paper, which is then laminated and sealed onto a three layer, 1â„8″ hardwood base before being cut into puzzle pieces. You read that right, the base of all of our puzzles are made from wood, not cardboard, because we want you to enjoy them for years to come.

Our puzzles are packaged in a jewelry grade box and sealed. We recommend you cut the backside seal on one edge when opening the box so the remaining seal acts as a hinge.

All of our puzzles, and even our packaging, are designed and manufactured in the USA from environmentally friendly materials. We use recycled materials for our packaging and shipping containers. The hardwood base is made from European birch from a managed forest. Our goal is to use only sustainable materials that were grown during our lifetime.

We use no plastic in this product or packaging.

Why Try Our Puzzles?

They are heirloom quality puzzles!

• They are built on a three-layer hardwood base - not paperboard.
• They can be put together while you are still having fun - not taking days or weeks to finish.
• Our target is about an hour to assemble.
• When putting our puzzles together, you don't need the entire dining room table.

You can use a small table or TV Tray. You can put them together while traveling in a car, RV, or even on the airplane.

• They can be used over and over again and still look new - not falling apart after a few times of being assembled.

A typical paperboard puzzle shows major wear problems after just a few times. Ours can be put together for so many more times before showing significant wear. We have one in the shop that we use as the demo, and it has been put together over several hundred times and still looks pretty good.

• They are heirloom puzzles intended to be used and passed down from generation to generation - not thrown away after a few uses.

A famous puzzle maker of the mid 1800s, J. H. Colton, made many map puzzles used in schools called "Dissected Maps." You can sometimes find them in antique shops and after being used for over 150+ years, they still look pretty good. We try to make ours to last as well.

• A typical puzzle of ours is a 4″ x 6″ puzzle with about 100 pieces.

There are about 12 tricks a puzzle maker can do to the puzzle that makes it more and more challenging to assemble. To meet our objective of "about an hour to assemble," we only do three of the tricks.

Trick #1 - Split Corners

You won't find any corner pieces in our puzzles. We split the corners, making them into two pieces vs one so that they just look like other pieces.

Trick #2 - Center to Edge

Some of the inside pieces continue out to the edge. If you like to build the frame first, you are in for a surprise.

The first time I made one with both of these tricks, I gave the first one to my wife. She loves to do puzzles. After about 10 minutes of trying to put the puzzle together, she said, "You are missing the corner pieces." I responded, "Nope, go back and continue working."

She came back after another 10 minutes and said, "It looks like you are missing edge pieces. Did you drop some by mistake?" "Nope, keep trying."

Finally, she came back and said, "Wow!!!"

For our custom puzzles, she would test assemble the puzzle and give them a rating (Easy, Medium, or Hard). She invented a new rating - "You've Got To Be Kidding" and that's the rating of the puzzles "YGTBK."

Trick #3 - Interior Straight Edges

Some of the interior pieces have straight edges, making them look like edge pieces.
We have been making these types of puzzles since 1977. Getting close to 50 years.

All of our puzzles are packaged in a jewelry-grade box like the one below.

Typical Box for Puzzle.