Thoughts of an introverted bookworm and avid jigsaw puzzler
Blackbirds Roost at Mill Creek is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. I just love his images, especially ones like this with a lot of buildings and other interesting elements. I love the coloring of the sky as well.
This was a nice, easy puzzle that was very enjoyable to put together. Here are a few closeups of some of the details:
Bright Heart is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games. The artwork is from EttaVee, which is the brand created by Jessi Raulet, an American artist living in France.
If you are looking for a challenge, this is it! I chose this puzzle because of its striking artwork; it has such beautiful colors and patterns!
I started this one with my friend Suzanne, who did the border and a bit of the interior, and then I finished it up by myself. There was a lot of looking at the poster and I decided to sort by shape when I was only halfway through the puzzle.
I’m not complaining, though. Even though it was hard, the image is amazing and the puzzle quality is really good. I highly recommend!
Another note about the artist: when I visited ettavee.com on my phone, a popup gave me the opportunity to access downloadable wallpapers and I now have a bit of her artwork on my phone screen!
Here are some pictures of the progress along the way, along with the finished puzzle.
Trick or Treat Hotel is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. I purchased this several months ago and have been holding onto it for Halloween puzzling. My friend Suzanne was over one night and helped me get it started. She did the border, which she loves doing, and I started on the house.
It took me a few days of puzzling to finish this one, mainly because the colors are so dark and similar to each other. I figured that would happen going into it, though, so I wasn’t upset by it. I really loved putting the house together. The rest was okay, but the house was great.
Happy Halloween!!
Beauty Guru is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games. The artist is Aimee Stewart. Even though I have heard of her and seen lots of pictures of her puzzles, this is the first one of hers that I have done. I picked it up at Community Aid because I like the colorful, cluttered appearance of it.
This puzzle was definitely challenging to do, although not so much that I got frustrated. I did the makeup brushes last, and they took quite a while to get done. I thought the quality was very good, and it included a nice-sized poster.
Along with the clue of books for the second week of the Facebook challenge I am doing, there was a bonus available for a puzzle with a lighthouse. I chose Daddy’s Coming Home, which is another Charles Wysocki puzzle, also from Buffalo Games. This one was 300 pieces.
I really enjoyed this puzzle. I especially loved the deep rust color of the lighthouse. I normally don’t love doing sky, but in a small piece count like this, it’s no problem.
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.
The day after my friend visited, I did two puzzles from the puzzle box.
The first one was Sewing Circle from E&L Corporation, which was a 500-piece puzzle. It appeared to be an older puzzle from the way the box looked. It was of average difficulty, but not too bad. There were definitely some false fits, and at the end of the puzzle, I had a piece that would not fit in the open spot, so I had to closely examine the puzzle to find the piece that was in the wrong place!
The other puzzle I did that day was a Charles Wysocki called Confection Street. It was a 300-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games. I really liked the image with the colorful houses and other interesting elements. It was quite easy to put together.
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!
Pete’s Gambling Hall is a 1000-piece Buffalo Games puzzle featuring the artist Charles Wysocki. His images are plentiful in the puzzling world, but this is only the second puzzle of his that I have done.
I got this second-hand and was pleasantly surprised to find that all the pieces were there. It’s always a gamble (pun intended!) when you get a puzzle that has already been done before.
There were a number of false fits, and I had to move pieces around several times. Other than that, the quality was good. I appreciated that there wasn’t too much of the sky and mountains because those were the hardest parts to solve.
All in all, a very fun puzzle! I enjoy putting together buildings, so this had a nice variety for me.
Such a fun puzzle! I got this one from my son for my birthday in 2022 and just got around to it last week. It’s called Hawaiian Food Truck Festival, and it’s a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games.
I enjoyed all of the fun details in this one. The border came together pretty easily, but then when I was working on the sky, I realized there were several sections in the wrong place. It took quite a while to get it straightened out.
Towards the end, I had to start relying heavily on the poster to figure out where individual pieces went. At the very end, even that wasn’t working, and I had to sort by shape to place the last few pieces.
Even though it’s a very busy puzzle, I still really enjoyed it.
In So Many Words 