Thoughts of an introverted bookworm and avid jigsaw puzzler
Corner Bakery is a 750-piece puzzle from Ravensburger, and the artist is Elissa Della-Piana. It is one of their large piece puzzles, so it completely filled up my puzzle board, which is designed to hold up to 1500-piece puzzles!
I love this image. The bakery seems so quaint and cozy. I especially love the red shelf and the chalkboard menu. It looks like a place that would be fun to visit, and not only for the delicious treats.
Wine Country Camper is a 750-piece puzzle from Ceaco, and the artist is Stephanie Peterson Jones. This charming puzzle is part of the Happy Camper series, and I was really happy to get a hold of it. The series is mostly 300-piece puzzles, with just a few larger ones, and I was glad to finally track down a copy of this one at Poshmark (not a place I expected to find puzzles!)
This was such a fun puzzle to do! I love all the colorful elements and different textures. I will definitely be doing this one again and again!
I have acquired several puzzles over the last few weeks that I am excited about doing. Most are new but a couple are used.
I am going to try buying fewer puzzles for the next month or so and try to focus on the ones I already have. That is a really difficult challenge for me, though, so we’ll have to see how I do!
I love rainbow puzzles, and this was a fun one. It’s so satisfying to work a puzzle section by section. I got this one at the puzzle swap and assumed I would do it once and pass it along, but I think I might keep it to do again.
The puzzle is from the ColorStory line, but I couldn’t find a specific title. The brand is Ceaco, and the artist is Lars Stewart. It is 750 pieces.
Ceaco has a series of puzzles called Happy Camper, and I picked up this 5-in-1 multipack featuring some of those images. I started doing Happy Camper puzzles after I finished all of the Food Trucks that are currently out. Most of them are only 300 pieces, which makes for a short puzzling experience, but they are really cute, so I like them. I thought this pack would be a good way to get a bunch of them for a lower price.
I was not impressed with this pack of puzzles at all. Some of the images are cut off versions of the original puzzles, and the quality was terrible. The image was coming off the cardboard in a lot of places. A lot of the pieces were damaged and a couple had even lost the knobs entirely. The puzzles are cute, but I would recommend getting the individual ones instead of the multipack. Those are usually a bit better quality.
One thing I did enjoy was that for the last two puzzles I did (the vertical 300-pieces ones), I solved them without looking at the image while I was puzzling. It gave me a different experience to what I normally do, and I enjoyed it. It was fun figuring out where sections went as the puzzle came together. I don’t know if I would like to do this all the time; I think it could be quite frustrating on a larger, more detailed puzzle.
Here are the completed puzzles from the set:
Cozy Front Porch is a 750-piece puzzle from Ravensburger. I got it from the puzzle box in Elizabethtown. It’s not my favorite type of puzzle to do, but I knew the quality would be good and that it would probably be a good puzzling experience. I do like the color palette of this image a lot, and I would call the experience satisfying.
The current puzzle challenge on the Casual Puzzlers Facebook group involves a weekly clue/puzzle theme, and the second one was Books. For that theme, I chose to redo a puzzle that I originally did back in 2021 – Frederick the Literate from Buffalo Games. This is a Charles Wysocki puzzle, and it is 750 pieces.
This was a lot of fun. I really enjoy putting together words in puzzles, and this one had a lot of those. All of the book titles are made up and cat-related – very cute! Of course, I found the cat fur to be the hardest part.
Cat Balloon Race is a 750-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Jeff Haynie. I am participating in a Spring Hopscotch challenge in the Casual Puzzler’s Facebook group and needed a puzzle for the Air Travel space. As I was scrolling Amazon under that topic, this one really caught my eye.
This was a very enjoyable puzzling experience. The image was too busy to easily sort pieces, so I just pulled out the edges and flipped the rest of the pieces over and put them in sorting trays. I missed a few pieces on the initial edge sort, but they turned up eventually and didn’t cause any problems.
Towards the end I did do a bit more sorting as there were a number of pastel pieces which were a bit harder to place. Overall, this puzzle provided a nice level of difficulty. The only real drawback was a ton of puzzle dust – more than I think I have seen before!
So many fun details in this puzzle! And I loved the image even though I would never go up in a hot air balloon myself. I’m too afraid of heights!
I recently got this set of Disney puzzles from the puzzle box near my house. It has 5 puzzles in it, which don’t have names. The brand is Ceaco. I thought the images looked like fun to do.
I started with this 300-piece image of Mickey and Minnie with Pluto outside under an umbrella. It came together pretty quickly.
Next I did this 300-piece puzzle of Mickey and Minnie dancing in front of a nighttime skyline. I loved the background on this one.
Next up was this 500-piece image of them dining with Goofy as their waiter and Donald Duck as the chef. This one was still pretty easy to do.
This 500-piece of Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was super tricky and took forever to complete. This was partly due to the large amount of dark pieces, but was actually made worse by the fact that the pieces were soft and even a little mushy and didn’t fit together well. I had to try and retry pieces to get them to fit, and even though it is technically complete, I am still not sure I got all the pieces in the right spots.
I finished up with this 750-piece puzzle of Mickey, Goofy, and Donald Duck on a bicycle. It was the most fun to do of all of them. It has a combination of very busy areas and sold color sections. These solid color sections were a lot easier than the sorcerer puzzle, though, because the pieces were in better shape and I could easily tell when a piece was in the right spot.
All in all, I enjoyed doing this set of puzzles. Plus, it was a great puzzle box value – five puzzles out for only one puzzle in!
So I did buy a 1,000 piece puzzle called Fantastic Fashionista from Ravensburger Puzzles and even finished about half of it, but I never completed it. I had finished all of the colored parts and was left with the white walls and floor to do, so it was definitely getting pretty tricky. Then we went out one day and left Baxter in the kitchen/dining room, and he pulled the puzzle down off the dining room table and completely dismantled it!
I had no way of knowing how many pieces were ruined or missing after that, so I decided to just trash the puzzle. At least I got to do the fun parts of the puzzle before it was wrecked! Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of my progress, but here’s a picture of the front of the box.
Before starting my next puzzle, I went to Michael’s and bought some foam board to put the puzzle on. That way I could move it to the sunroom if I needed to leave Baxter alone in the house (since we close that door when we leave him alone).
The puzzle I just did was Frederick the Literate by Buffalo Games. It’s part of the Cats of Charles Wysocki line. It was super cute. If you look at the picture closely, you can see that the book titles are all fun, made-up titles related to cats. The cat fur was definitely the hardest part, but because the puzzle was only 750 pieces, even that wasn’t too bad.
I am still really enjoying spending time doing puzzles, although I don’t think I have the patience for large difficult sections, such as single color areas. I want to be making progress all the time, even if it’s a bit slower some of the time.
My next puzzle is Sandra Boynton’s Puzzle Complaints. It’s 500 pieces and just looks like a lot of fun.
In So Many Words 