Colors of Italy - Salumeria Educa 1500 Puzzle

Last week I spent two of my active evenings in futile search for my next knitting and sewing projects. I have 9 balls of Drops Muskat 100% Egyptian cotton and I want to cast on a new summer cardigan. I went through Ravelry, browsed my favourites, pondered over my queued projects, went on the Drops Design site through every single design they have published for Drops Muskat yarn, finally randomly googled images of knitted summer cardigans - nothing. Hours wasted in search and nothing clicked.
I spent Friday evening and all of Saturday sewing a new pair of pants for Gaby (which still need to be photographed and blogged about) and on Sunday I started browsing through my Burdas to decide what to sew next. And again - nothing. After hours of going through patterns, checking the Russian Burda site for amateur works and trying to match them in my mind with my fabrics, not only was I left uninspired, but almost depressed. Until I figured it out - I was just tired of constant sewing and knitting, I needed a break.
I've had two unopened 1500 pcs. puzzles for more than a year and maybe it was time to assemble one of them. I'm a sucker for such corny puzzle pictures of beautiful city sites and I've had four delightful evenings, listening to Poirot mysteries and gradually creating the whole picture:

Monday morning:

Tuesday morning:

Wednesday morning:

Details:

This is my 5th Educa puzzle and so far I had regarded the brand as one of the reputable ones. However, despite my enjoyment of the puzzle, mostly due to the picture, which is quite to my taste where puzzles are concerned, I have a good mind to write to the company with my complaints. Apart from the fact, that the cutting was of very low quality and the pieces weren't unique in shape and form and were easily replaceable, there are two major blunders in this puzzle: part of the key picture is covered with the company logo and other insignia - this means that this part is to be assembled blindly, which is inadmissible, no respectable company does that and this is the first time I see such puzzle cover design; and secondly - there are two black spots, one of them rather significant, which should not have been there and are not part of the picture. If this was a watch or a purse I would immediately assume that it was a counterfeit, but who would counterfeit a puzzle?!

Anyway, I feel refreshed after four evenings of puzzle assembly and last night I knitted a large gauge sample for Joy cardigan by Kim Hargreaves and traced a T-shirt Burda pattern, which I might turn into a tunic for me. Back to old creatively inspired me :)