Tag: jigsaw puzzles

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Colorful Peacock

Colorful Peacock is a 1000-piece puzzle from B Creative, which is another new brand to me. It was a little pricey, but I just fell in love with the image and was sure I would enjoy it a lot.

Sure enough, it was pure joy the entire time. I did it in one sitting and absolutely loved the experience. Of course, I sorted by color and started with the smallest pile – the purple. I found that even with the colors that had more pieces, it was easy to separate them into different shades and different textures. Even the in-between pieces had something on them; there were virtually no solid yellow pieces at the end.

Look at this beauty!

I am definitely going to keep an eye on this brand for other images that I like because the experience was so good and the quality was great.

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Edible Flowers

Edible Flowers is a 1000-piece puzzle from Galison, and the artist is Olga Akbarova. It’s so pretty – I love it!

One of my other new friends from church, Suzanne, came over to puzzle with me, and she picked this from my to-do shelf. She started with the border, which was challenging because it is mostly black. After a while of doing that, she worked on the signs for each flower.

I started with the words in the center of the puzzle and then moved onto different flowers depending on which color had the smallest amount of pieces. Once we each had a few things completed, we started putting them into position. This picture shows how far we got that evening.

I asked her if she wanted me to set it aside until she could come back and work on it some more, but she was fine with me finishing it up. So I did that the next day! Here’s the finished puzzle – isn’t it pretty!

I really enjoyed this puzzle. It was a nice level of difficulty and was good quality. The colors and textures were easy to separate into the different flowers. There wasn’t too much solid black, and the border was pretty easy once the rest of the puzzle was completed. Highly recommend!

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Difficult Donuts

Difficult Donuts is a 1000-piece puzzle from Cozytime Puzzles. I got it second-hand from the puzzle box in my area.

It lived up to its name of difficult! It wasn’t impossible, it just took more time than other puzzles I have done. It took me several evenings to complete, but it was very satisfying to see it all come together. Also, the quality was good on both pieces and fit.

Are you a donut fan? I enjoy them but can’t have them very often since I became diabetic.

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Pete’s Gambling Hall

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.

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Ice Cream Dream (Repeat)

I have recently made a couple of new friends at the church I attend now, and both of them enjoy doing puzzles. My friend Jessyca came over to do a puzzle and enjoyed it so much she came back two more times so we could finish it together!

I let her choose the puzzle, and she picked Ice Cream Dream by Lego because she likes Legos. It’s a 1000-piece puzzle that I got as a birthday gift a couple of years ago, and I had done it in January of 2023.

We took the time to sort by color and did each ice cream tub as a mini puzzle before putting them together and filling in the border and in-between pieces. You can see our progress in the three sessions in the photos below.

I had such a good time puzzling with a friend. And this weekend, I’m going to Brick Fest with her to see the actual thing!

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Travel

Travel is a 1000-piece puzzle from Cavallini, which is a new-to-me brand. It comes in a cylinder and has a cloth drawstring bag to hold the pieces. There was also a nice poster.

I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle. I am very drawn to grid puzzles like this, and I also love putting together words in puzzles. It was easy to sort the pieces by color, and then I just worked on whatever caught my eye.

What destination on this puzzle would you most like to visit? My initial answer was London, but upon further reflection, I think Australia or New Zealand would be amazing!

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Disney Puzzles

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!

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Paper Paradise

I love the idea of paper quilling and other paper crafts, and I actually was into making stamped cards for several years. So when I saw Paper Paradise at the bookstore, I had to get it.

This 500-piece Galison puzzle has a beautiful design with bold colors and intricate detail. I thoroughly enjoyed putting it together. The quality of the puzzle was excellent as well. The pieces had a nice feel and fit together well, and the image was clear and crisp. The artist is Yulia Brodskaya.

I highly recommend this puzzle! I would love to do more like it!

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Edible Mushrooms

Edible Mushrooms is a 1000-piece puzzle that my son gave me for Christmas/birthday last year. It was one I had on my wish list, however, I had forgotten exactly what the image looked like and the box didn’t look fun or inspiring at all. I wanted to do a 1000-piece puzzle recently and decided to do this one and just get it over with.

I was surprised when I opened it and looked at the poster and saw that the image was actually much better than I had guessed based on the box design. It did have some solid-color pieces scattered around the puzzle, which I knew could take a bit more time to do. When I started sorting the pieces, I noticed that the back had letters printed on it. This is the first puzzle I have done that was separated by sections like that, so I decided to go ahead and sort by the letters on the back of the pieces. There were six different sections once I had sorted them:

The picture was so fun to put together. The fact that I was doing it in sections made it fly by, and the solid color pieces were no problem at all since I was only doing a few at a time. The puzzle pieces seemed to have a plastic coating with a white paper backing. They clicked together in a very satisfying way and held together quite well.

Here is the first section to give you an idea how big each one was:

My favorite part was the legend at the bottom – words are so fun to put together. I did really enjoy all of the mushrooms, too, though. It was just a great puzzle all around! I think the next time I do this puzzle I will mix all of the pieces together and just use the letters on the back if I get stuck at all.

I guess the lesson here is not to judge a book by its cover, or a puzzle by its box! I have actually put a couple more of this style puzzle on my wish list already.

Note: I have seen this item sold under a couple of different brand names on Amazon. The one I think my son bought for me was BBOLDIN.

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Painted Lady

Painted Lady is a charming 500-piece puzzle from Bits and Pieces that I picked up at a puzzle box in my area. At first glance I thought it was a Charles Wysocki, but it is actually Joseph Holodook. This is my first puzzle from him.

I really enjoyed this puzzle. After a quick sort, I did the edges and then started on the various sections of the puzzle. My favorite part was the painters’ buggy – I like the dark colors and words on the side of it.

This came together quickly and was a lot of fun. I’ve been doing a lot of these smaller puzzles lately, though, and I think I’m going to tackle a 1000-piece for my next one.