Fresh Ayer News

Many years ago, my great grandfather founded J. C. Ayer & Company, which provided remedies to customers around the world. This new puzzle features one of the original advertisements from Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral. Below, alongside a picture of the puzzle, you will find one customer’s accolades from an issue of Ayer’s Almanac from 1868, which was translated into many languages and distributed world-wide. This puzzle is 7″ x 11″ and has 174 pieces.

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Congratulations to Catherine Rafferty-Millett for winning our Holiday Puzzle Photo Contest! She got a whopping 58 likes on her photo!

We look forward to working with her to create a beautiful keepsake puzzle! When it is complete, we will share it with you here!

Stay tuned.

Jim

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Here at J. C. Ayer & Company, November makes us think of one thing above all else: Holiday Gifts. To get you started with holiday gift giving, we are kicking off a custom puzzle contest. One winner will win a custom or standard puzzle, maximum size 11″ x 14″, a $320 value!

To enter this content, post a photo on the J. C. Ayer & Company Facebook page that you think would make a good puzzle. Then, tell your friends to like the image. The person with the most likes on December 5, wins a standard puzzle or a custom puzzle with their image, delivered by Christmas!

Custom Puzzle Contest Rules

How to enter:

1) Post your best photo on the J. C. Ayer & Company’s wall on Facebook. (see this link on what makes a good puzzle) The photo to the right is a good example of a custom puzzle made from a customer family photo. Only photos submitted to the J. C. Ayer & Company Facebook page will be eligible to win. You may enter only one image per person. Please make sure to include a photo’s caption if you think it needs one.

2) Share the link to your picture with your friends and family and ask them to VOTE for your picture (and ask them to share the link with their friends, too!) To VOTE, they will need visit the J. C. Ayer & Company Facebook Page and then “Like” your picture. Also, please encourage your friends to “Like” the Facebook page the so that they can see the results on the contest.

Judging and Results:

1) The contest will run from Wednesday, November 21 to Tuesday, December 4th. The winning image will be determined by the picture with the most “Likes” at the end of the contest, and will be announced on the J. C Ayer & Company Facebook page and the Fresh Ayer News blog on Wednesday, December 5th.

2) The winning image will be profiled on the our Facebook page as well as our blog and will receive a custom or standard puzzle, valued at no more than $320!

3) Contest is open to all Facebook users, 18 years and older.

4) The prize includes shipment to an address in the United States. Should a non-US resident win the contest, they will be responsible for shipping fees, taxes and duties on the prize.

5) J. C. Ayer & Company reserves the right to use entries for marketing purposes including including on Facebook, the ayerpuzzles.com website, and printed material.

If you have any questions about the contest, please contact Catherine Weber (cweber@webermediapartners.com)

Thanks, and Holiday Shopping!

– Jim

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Make Believe Ballroom by Larry Rivers

Years ago this puzzle was in my catalog. I am putting it back on my website because I really like the picture and have redesigned small puzzles to have many more, smaller pieces. In spite of its size, Make Believe Ballroom has more than 200 pieces.

I am just old enough to have seen the great Disney films and Broadway musicals when they first opened though I was pulled away from the last episode of Fantasia, Walpurgisnacht, deemed too much for my tender young mind. That theatre and the songs from Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and others wonderfully fought the depression and the following war with laughter. Make Believe Ballroom is in the same spirit. Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire could have been dancing on that bed.

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This is a story of a special puzzle that I recently made. My customer sent me two pictures of racing motorboats, one for the puzzle and one for the drop-out-lettering. We decided on an oval puzzle because a rectangular one would have too much unnecessary background. The final size was 10 x 15 inches. I used a design from an 11 x 14 puzzle so I had to modify the periphery. The picture above shows the design part-way made.

I wanted the name in the puzzle just as it is on the transom. I was glad that the picture was taken almost directly from astern so I could just trace the letters. The name was slanted to be parallel to the boat’s waterline. The letters were large enough so that the puzzle could be put together with or without them.

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Last fall, a customer asked me to make a puzzle from a tiny jpeg. I asked if she might have a better picture, but no luck. Moreover, the puzzle was to be for a friend who “had everything,” a dilemma that has happened to many of us in the past.

I spoke to a colleague who suggested using photo-editing software that works within Photoshop to make a copy of a photographic file to look like it had been painted in the style of a particular artist. We picked Vincent van Gogh. This produced the much larger picture shown below, very impressionistic, and almost unrecognizable from the original. The result was my best puzzle of last Christmas season.

This can happen to anyone who takes a picture with their mobile phone or even with a handheld camera on a low setting. And sometimes there is no other option but that small photo. If you want to create a puzzle with a low resolution photo, don’t give up. Send it along and we can work together to make a spectacular puzzle.

Jim

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I recently received this letter from a bride for whom I made a custom puzzle. She agreed to have me publish her story.

Enjoy, Jim

“When I was planning for my wedding, one of my ushers Tim contacted me and told me that he wanted to get us something special for our wedding–not just something from our registry but something meaningful to us.  He suggested a wooden puzzle since he knows that I love puzzles.  A customized wooden puzzle had the advantage of being durable and being designed to reflect us. I, of course, loved the idea; and Tim suggest we try to incorporate the puzzle into the wedding.

Picking the image for the puzzle was easy.  We had had designed for us a wedding logo.  The logo was our names (Jerry & Christina) stylized in a way that they could be read upside down or right side up.  We felt that using the wedding logo rather than a photograph would commemorate the day appropriately and fit the theme of a puzzle.

After much consultation, we decided that the best way to incorporate the puzzle into the wedding was to have our guests help complete the puzzle during the reception.  Due to the number of guests and the fact that many of the guests don’t speak English, rather than having each guest put in a piece, we had a representative from each banquet table put in a piece after
we toasted with the guests at that table.

In order for the representative from each table to put in the puzzle piece easily (we realized that not everybody is into puzzles as I am), the puzzle was designed with a number of special pieces that would be relatively obvious to place.  We used our names and our wedding date and a number of objects (such as a guitar, a tiger, a cross, etc.) that were special to us.

During the reception, the partially finished puzzle was on the table as Tim supervised guests inserted pieces.  Because the wooden puzzle was quite sturdy we were able to place the puzzle on an easel after all the guests finished.   At the end of the reception after we had said our thank yous, Jerry and I placed the last piece, a heart, into the puzzle together.   It was a wonderful way to end the evening with meaning.”

Christina Chan-Park

PS.  Since the puzzle commemorated the wedding with one of my favorite hobbies, we ended up commemorating the wedding with
one of Jerry’s favorite hobbies too–comic books!

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Long, narrow, standard puzzles that better fit the new formats, 10×15 and 15×22 will be made bigger with more pieces for the same price. Koran Cover is the first to change. The Elephant and the Mouse will change soon. Both puzzles were almost the same size and the picture below shows the difference.

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I have redesigned my smaller puzzles. Below left is the old 8×10 design with about 160 pieces and right is the new with about 250.

This new design is the first I am really happy with smaller than 11×14. Prices are the same so now you can get a good custom puzzle for $190 rather than the $320 that an 11×14 costs. Of course there wil be more than one design as time goes on and these designs will apply to the new 7×11 format as well. I will show some samples in future posts.

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I have been basing the sizes of my puzzles on the photographic standard: 8×10, 11×14 and 16×20. These sizes are now less relevant than they used to be. Like movies and television, the new standard is more horizontal. Many digital camera sensors follow the 24×36 millimeter standard, a width to length ratio of 1 to 1 1/2. So now I will offer puzzles based on the new standard as well as the old. The new sizes are 7×11, 10×15 and 15×22. Here is an example of a custom puzzle I made under the old standard and what it would be under the new:

The puzzle was 8.75 x 13.7 from an 11×14. Now I would make it 9.4 x 14.7 from a 10×15. I forsee making almost all of my special puzzles this way and, as time goes by, my standard puzzles as well. Prices will remain the same.

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