The brightly colored painting featured in this puzzle was painted by San Diego artist, Renée Tay.

I used my standard Swirl Curl cutting style although there are some "open curls" as discussed in Puzzle 26.

The figure in Cosmic Mother presented a challenge, as I prefer to cut around the edges of exposed areas of the woman. I eventually adopted a strategy of focusing on the colored spots, more so for the upper part of the body - so the puzzle piece edges appear as an artifact of the spots draped over the image.

This is the second Renée Tay picture I've done. The first one was a very difficult to put together. In this puzzle, I decided to make some of the edges directly interlock and the pieces are a little larger (the puzzle has 208 pieces versus 263 in In Heaven's Arms).

Puzzles 24 and 25 each had a butterfly piece. In this puzzle I decided to make a multi-piece butterfly and it came out quite well (see picture, below). I've been adding stars to a number of my recent puzzles, this one included. This star figural is a little more "swirly". Finally, I added a Yin-Yang symbol figural consisting of two pieces, a response to the painting.

Significant milestones

• Largest Multi-Piece Figural

As it happened (from my Journal archives)

June 22, 2000

Not much logged other than the cutting of the multi-piece butterfly figural.