Thoughts of an introverted bookworm and avid jigsaw puzzler
The Farm is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. I love this image so much. My favorite part about his artwork are the buildings, so I love that this building is so prominent in the image. All of the signs and decorations on the front add so much interest and make it easier to puzzle than a plain building would be.
My friend Renee came over recently and hung out for an evening while she was on vacation. We ordered pizza and watched a couple of episodes of Tracker, and then we decided to play Puzzle Chess.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with puzzle chess, here’s how it works. You pick a small puzzle (we used 100 pieces) and you build the border together and lay out all the other pieces. Then you start a chess clock, which you can get on your phone, and take turns putting one piece into the puzzle. Once you have placed your piece, you tap your clock to end your turn and start the other person’s time. Whoever has the most time left when the puzzle is done is the winner!
We played four rounds, and I won three of them. To be fair, I puzzle all the time and Renee only does it when she is with me (except for sometimes on her phone). Our first puzzle was Popsicle Monsters from fishwisdom, and I won by 16 seconds.
The second puzzle was a Peanuts puzzle called Birthday from RoseArt. Renee won this one by 15 seconds.
The third puzzle was Beautiful Wild Animals from a generic Chinese brand. I won this one by 40 seconds.
The fourth puzzle was a Dr. Seuss puzzled called I Will Not Eat Green Eggs and Ham from Buffalo Games. This was the hardest puzzle we did and also the only vertical one. I won by 2 minutes and 5 seconds.
I love playing puzzle chess and am so happy when someone agrees to play it with me.
Storin’ Up is a 300 piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. I needed a quick one the other day, so I grabbed this one off my shelf.
As always, I enjoyed doing the buildings and the signs. But how cute are all those buggies! I especially loved those.
Mr. Swallowbark is a 300-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. Between the thrift store one weekend and a puzzle swap the next, I ended up with two copies of this puzzle – oops!
This was so much fun to put together. I love the red barn, and I am especially fond of the row of brooms hanging on display.
Diamond Dahlia is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Josie Lewis. I think this is a perfect example of a rainbow puzzle. It is so satisfying to do a puzzle where I can start with one color and work my way around.
The white lines in the design along with the shading of the colors made it easier to place pieces than I thought it would be, although the red and pinks were very similar and took a bit longer than the other colors.
I really want to get one other puzzle of hers, Rainbow Sunrise. It is out of stock everywhere I’ve looked, though, so I’ve got an alert set up on ebay in case one shows up there. Here’s a picture of that one:
Hickory Haven Canal is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. This one was a Christmas present from my son. 😊
If you do puzzles for any length of time, you will most certainly come across Charles Wysocki and his Americana/folk art scenes. I am drawn to them partly because of my love of buildings, which are very common in his images, but I also just like the general feel of them.
Sometimes they have large areas of one color, like a green meadow or a field of crops, and for those I tend to prefer a smaller piece count so they won’t be super hard. Even though this image has a lot of snow, there is enough going on all over the puzzle that it was not too hard to do as a 1000-piece.
All that to say this was a very enjoyable puzzle, and I’m very happy that Michael got it for me.
Tall Sea Tale is a 300-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. There is something about his artwork that just draws me in. A lot of them do have a muted color palette, like this one, which makes me happy it is 300 pieces and not a larger size.
This is one I got in the haul from the friend who was moving away and didn’t want to take her puzzles. It had a ton of dog hair in the box, which was a bit annoying, but the puzzle itself was in good shape and had all of the pieces. There were five extra pieces in the box, however, that were smaller and clearly from another puzzle. I think they might have been part of the puzzle I did a couple of weeks ago that was missing eight pieces. I can’t know for sure because I already got rid of that puzzle, but even if they did go with it, it would still have been missing three pieces. Most people don’t like missing pieces or will only tolerate one or two, so I wouldn’t have tried to swap it anyway.
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 just love Charles Wysocki, and this image made for the perfect puzzling experience. The mix of buildings and horse-drawn carts with the landscape elements was ideal for puzzling without getting stuck on any one area.
This one is called Gull’s Nest, and it is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games.
The Colours of Spring is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Terry Redlin. Redlin is a new-to-me artist, and I thought the image was kind of charming on the box, but I found it to be darker on the puzzle than it was on the box, which made it somewhat difficult.
This was another one I got for free from the friend who moved away. She had told me she couldn’t guarantee the puzzles were complete, but I was still quite surprised to have a total of eight missing pieces! There was also so much dog hair in the box – more than I’ve ever seen before in a used puzzle.
This one unfortunately had to go in the trash. I am not willing to pass it on to anyone with so many pieces missing.
In So Many Words 