marius

Wow - a pillow tapestry. Do you make it into a pillow, or frame and hang?

And, even though cryptos activate my dyslexic "gene" - thanks for this one! Thanks for correction on my message too.

It's late ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Baldur

Baldur has been making them into pillows.
Baldur has a lot of things on the walls already and a backlog of things that need to be framed someday.
Being out of work has given me time to get lots of projects further along, but only those that require time instead of money

Normal

Most interesting about Klimt. Hope one need not get all absinthian in order to create wonderful art. Re the crypto - thanks! It's a favorite since forever. Doubt I'm up to the challenge. Will muse some. Good night.

Baldur

The listening audience is crashing early tonight, What's a host to do?

Anyone curious about the Klimt pillows can see them at www.EhrmanTapestry.com. Baldur has the 'coral', 'mandarin' and is getting to the end of 'chocolate'. good swaths of 'chocolate has been seriously altered.

Baldur

-has +have

There was a bird in the lower right corner of the 'Chocolate' pillow which seemed odd to me, so I reworked the pattern there.
Also a good quarter of the piece was a rather Mondrian cubist design in white, greys and black. That is gone a replaced with square within square patterns in ivory, deep caramel and bittersweet chocolate.
To Baldur that section now looks like an assortment of game pieces from 'Cathedral'

Baldur

I think next I would love to try an intricate Wm. Morris type floral pattern, one of my own creation however.

Baldur has a very complicated sense of style.

Baldur

#1625 +nd=and

Robindcr8l

First, I'd like to award 10 points to Normal for absinthian!

Next, dear Baldur, I would like to point out that it was not my sleep deprivation, but yet another typo that threw me this time (not to mention made-up words). In the second line, your word OEVCAM, I believe the V is incorrect and should be a U. I point this out only to assuage (6 points at least) my fragile ego from believing for one minute that I am not brilliant. This was your trickiest cryptoquip yet! You could be a cryptoquip author for a living, I dare say. Right after you finish your tapestries! Thanks for the fun!

sheftali52

Robin, I agree with you. The V should have been a U where you noted it. I felt Baldur was testing us with that one! Wasn't this latest cryptogram a challenge?

solosater

I have a question.

How did I figure the cryptogram out without trouble if there were errors?

I don't know what that means.

Really.

Shouldn't that not be possible?

And I'm out again, must away to my bed.

solosater

No wait I'm looking and I didn't save my key so I cant even tell now but I know I got it so how?

Are there really errors?

I'm so confused...

sheftali52

Solo, you probably got it in spite of the one small error. There was just one letter that was wrong, so if you got the rest of it right, you might not have noticed. I had to google the thing to figure out where the error was.

Baldur

*$QV CZEAAEO QWP *XM VAE*XD *TLMV
PEP ODZM QWP OEUCAM EW *XM $QCM
QAA UEUVD $MZM *XM CTZTOTLMV
QWP *XM UTUM ZQ*XV TS*OZQCM

CM$QZM *XM FQCCMZ$TNH UD VTW
*XM ATTHEWO OAQVV TZ QAENM NQNXMP
BTV* NQZZTAA PZQ$EWOV QWP E*V $TW
*XEV OQUM *XQ* CQAPSZ XQ*NXMP

The new Deluxe corrected version.

Heavens, Baldur is getting too old the keep the knots out of his chain of thought. Robin is correct the V should be a U. Luckily Baldur kept his worksheet and was able to determine how this error happened.
Bad penmanship. In a long cryptogram solosater the bad letter shouldn't throw you off that much, the trick in this one was obviously the nonsense words.
But Baldur figured that they would show up in an internet search and are thus admissable.

Baldur

Let me explain my technique for devising these puzzles.

First Baldur drafts the text. In this case there were lots of rather unusual words.
Most people solve these puzzles by looking for 1 letter words such as 'A' or 'I' and then the simple shorter words such as 'and', 'the', is' etc etc.
Then they fill in all the letters that they assume are correct and try to flesh out sensible words from the skeleton they constructed.

Then I type out the text on the computer using a large boldface font leaving a space between each letter ,5 spaces between each wordand exta space between each line

Below this Baldur types out the alphabet twice.
The first is a master decipher key, that I fill out as I progress.
'The second is a used letter checklist, that I cross letters off from as I've used them. It's quite simple once you get going to carelessly reuse the same letter unless you have something to easily refer to. This second list may contain odd symbols in addition to letters, including $,@,*, ?.

Baldur

Next I print out the list.

Then I start looking through the text for letter patterns. If there is a place that I can replace letters to create words like 'matthew' or 'thong' that is impossible to resist doing . (I have tried to find ways to insert longer phrases but the structure of matthew's name is too difficult.)

Once such words have been located I transpose all the corresponding letters in the puzzle, carefully filling each into the master key and crossing each letter off the 'used letter' list.
From then on it's rather easy. Having the larger text with space between each letter really helps as trying to conform my handwriting to the size constraints of a typed page just doesn't work well.

After the puzzle has been devised I retype it onto a document and copy & paste it here onto my forum thread.

Easy.

Baldur

'All Baldur, All the Time'

I was rather energetic this morning and decided to take out the waffle iron and whip up yet another marvelous homemade breakfast.
They were quite good but got me thinking about maple syrup.
Since Baldur has been unemployed on of the sad things I've been forced to do is to stop buying real maple syrup, instead it's the mass-market faux maple flavored stuff, sigh.
Baldur will remember in future times of plenty to stow away several gallons of the real thing in his larde.
I actually use very little syrup compared to most people who drown their hotcakes in floods of the stuff. But when a small bottle at the market is $15.99 compared to $3 for a large bottle of the synthetic one must learn to adapt.

Baldur does have gallons of olive oil and many many large cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato puree downstairs, always having taken advantage of good sale prices.
Every 6 months or so there are large cans of olive oil on sale for $9.99, the normal price depending on brand being anywhere from $19.99 to $35.99.
The brand of Italian tomatoes that we prefer here at Chez Baldur normally retail for $1.79 each but at least once a year go on sale at an amazing 2/$1.
When this happens Baldur will buy 8 cases (96 cans). I use 3 cans to make a pot of tomato sauce, those 96 cans will last about a year.

Baldur

on +e =one
larde+r =larder

Robindcr8l

Baldur, Robin is adequately humbled by the time and effort put into one cryptogram by you, and is embarrassed at pointing out one measly little typo. Forgive her.

Dragon

Baldur, I rather enjoyed your typo in 1636. I found it quite amusing to think of someone stowing away gallons of Maple Syrup in their larde!

sheftali52

Sheftali also appreciates the work Baldur puts into his cryptograms, especially the extra effort of inserting "matthew" somewhere in them. Very clever, and I love the end results. Thanks again, and we humbly await more, as Baldur's time permits.