Simple Pleasures

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles2 Comments

Simple Pleasures by Steve Cameron – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

Happily, unlike the two previous White Mountain puzzles I’ve assembled, this one had very good quality and I enjoyed myself very much! I love the look of older advertising, or even images like this one where it’s in the style of old advertisements. Looks amazing and it made for great puzzling.

The fit on this puzzle was excellent, almost tight enough for me to stand the puzzle on end – which was a lovely change from the last two White Mountain puzzles whose fit was loose and floppy. Perhaps it’s where the puzzle was made, the type of chipboard, or even how sharp the dies that cut the pieces are. Whatever it was, this puzzle was very good in the fit department, which made me happy. The image reproduction was better as well, there were no blurry or fuzzy parts of the image. Overall I’d give this puzzle a very good rating, and I enjoyed myself from beginning to end!

This is one of life’s simple pleasures for me, a morning with peace and quiet and a perfect cup of coffee. Black, two sweeteners. Nothing fru-fru for me, coffee flavored coffee and that’s it. It’s a great way to start the day. Also, love the polka-dots in the background, it made these pieces easy to find.

Even if they’re store bought cookie dough, warm cookies from the oven are another of life’s simple pleasures that I relish. I was lucky enough to have a mom who made everything from scratch, and having warm cookies made with love and a tall glass of cold milk – makes me yearn for simpler times.

Of course I had to save the best part for last – completing a fun jigsaw puzzle in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle – truly a simple pleasure. All the pieces were pulled out on the initial sort, but they had to wait in their little container until everything else was finished.😉

This just speaks for itself, doesn’t it. If you know, you know. 🧩💖

Living In Bird World

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles9 Comments

Living In Bird World by Lisa Houck – Liberty Puzzles – 498 Pieces

This artwork is beautiful and so different, it made for excellent puzzling; I had a great time with this one and found myself completely absorbed in the assembly, which is exactly what I needed at the time. Beautiful artwork on an excellent quality puzzle and I even got to spend a little bit of time with my wonderful daughter who puzzled with me for half an hour or so, it was lovely. 💕

Liberty Puzzles are my favorite modern wooden puzzle company, their puzzles have beautiful artwork, and their pieces are complex and designed by some of the best in the business. Liberty puzzles have more whimsies than most other companies, and they are designed to go along with the artwork. I’ve never been disappointed by one of their puzzles, or their customer service. When I came back to the puzzle board after my two year hiatus I went a little crazy and ordered four of their large puzzles, and this beauty is one of them.

Look at these whimsies, so many birds! And because this is Bird World, there are no people at all, just birds, insects, and foliage. It made for such an entertaining assembly.

I hope you guys like these pictures of the back of wooden puzzles, because this one was a bear.🐻 When I was flipping it over I accidentally hit the light above the puzzle board and bleeped it all up! It probably took about five minutes or more to put everything back where it belonged. It made me think though, wouldn’t it be a fun exercise to assemble one of these puzzles upside down? It probably wouldn’t be as difficult as it may seem, but the only way to know is to try, right?

The symmetrical section in the middle is where I started with the assembly, the pieces were obviously easy to find. Want to know why those shapes are in this bird puzzle? Well, they all fit together to make an interesting little bird house!

I saw the image on the Liberty website, on the page for this puzzle, so of course I had to try it for myself. It took a bit of doing, and figuring out how to get the pieces connected without breaking them took me several tries and several minutes, but eventually I got there. It’s adorable! The top looks a little wonky, but I did my best. 🕊🏠

Admont Abbey Library In Progress…

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzling4 Comments

Admont Abbey Library by William Carr – Ravensburger – 500 pieces

This puzzle is going together rather well, which is not anything like what I’d envisioned. I stayed away from this puzzle for quite a few years, it just looked so muted and as if it would be very difficult; but it hasn’t been that way at all. This poor thing has been shuffled around and around always not making the cut cause I was too scared to try it that day, or not in the mood, or whatever reason I told myself. Thank goodness I finally took the plunge because it’s been way more fun than it looks!

The pieces seem brighter than the image on the box, although it’s still quite muted in color. But it’s not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. One small section leads to another and things are going much more smoothly than anticipated.

I’m having lots more fun than I’d even hoped for!

Nature’s Bounty Box

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles4 Comments

Nature’s Bounty Box – Puzzlebug – 500 pieces

You can’t believe it, right? Stacey the puzzle snob did a Puzzlebug puzzle? Yes, I did. I don’t think I’ll be doing one again soon, there are just too many excellent puzzles here at my house to be assembled; but I really liked this image and even though this brand isn’t one I ever buy, not even at the thrift store (usually) there was something about this one. And for only $0.99 cents I just had to give this brand another go because this image spoke to me.

I decided to do this puzzle on a day when I wasn’t feeling well at all. I dumped the pieces out of the box onto a tray and started sorting, but I had to take a break relatively quickly and didn’t go back in the puzzle room for the rest of the day. The next morning when I made my way back to the puzzle board I looked at the VERY thin pieces and to be perfectly honest I almost dumped them in the garbage. They were so thin, I thought to myself “there’s no way these pieces are going to fit together properly, this will be a horrible assembly”. But before I did anything I found two edge pieces that went together to check the fit, and it was much better than I anticipated. As you can see from the picture above, I didn’t toss the pieces in the trash, I continued on with the sorting and assembly.

There hasn’t been a Puzzlebug puzzle on my board in 10 years, I checked. Any fair and impartial blogger should give them another go and see if the quality has improved, right? Well, that’s not why I bought this puzzle, I just really liked the image and for some reason I’m not sure of I bought it. They’re still pretty far down the quality food chain in my opinion, but there are a couple of positives: the image reproduction is very nice, if a little shiny, and the fit is actually quite good – whole sections could be picked up and moved with no problems at all, and they have some amazing, colorful images to choose from. On the negative side; there is no variety in piece shape, every piece is either a long, thin or a short, fat ballerina, the chipboard used is very thin, there were many pieces still attached and with hanging chads, and the puzzle dust wasn’t really dust, it was bigger pieces of paper from the chipboard and there was a lot of it. I don’t normally speak about boxes because I’m not a collector and I don’t care much about them; but their boxes have a flip top, made of very thin cardboard, and if you were someone who keeps puzzles it’s the type of box that makes losing pieces easy.

The assembly was a little disappointing, but still it was fun to watch each box fill up with the chosen food as the assembly went on, and it wasn’t so easy as to be boring. I can see the draw for those people who don’t work as many puzzles as some of us and don’t know all the different brands and qualities available, or for those who don’t have as much to spend on non-essentials like puzzles. Puzzlebug has many images that look extremely entertaining to assemble, and you can’t beat the price of less than $2 brand new in most dollar stores.

There’s no judgement here if you buy this brand, however you puzzle and what puzzles you buy is none of my damn business. I enjoyed this assembly, and if you enjoy working this brand then more power to ya, truly. It’ll probably be a while before I assemble a Puzzlebug again, but I was a little more impressed with this brand than I was the last time. And honestly if I see one of their beautiful images at the thrift store (they really do have some gorgeous, colorful pictures to choose from), I just may buy another one! 😮

In fact…

The fit was so good that I got one of my favorite pictures!

I saw a post on a Facebook puzzle group recently where someone had taken several 350 and 500 piece Puzzlebug puzzles and glued each one to make placemats for the kitchen table. They looked so good, it made me stop and think it just might be a good idea to try. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Monsters

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles4 Comments

Monsters – Re-marks – 1000 pieces

This was a wonderfully entertaining puzzle that was even better than I’d hoped. I enjoyed every part of this puzzle – even the sorting if you can believe it. 😮 I’m letting my weird brain take over while I’m puzzling these days, and whatever way it decides it wants to assemble is what I do.

Don’t want to sort? Don’t! Want to puzzle without using an image to assist? Go for it! Want to let your OCD out to play and revel in lining up pieces on the trays and keeping everything neat and tidy? Of course you should! (See, I told you my brain was weird)

Re-marks has such a wonderful catalog of collage images; book covers, travel posters, movies, decades, themes like this one, etc. Almost every one of them looks good to me. The quality is good/very good, and this puzzle especially had an excellent fit which made me quite happy. The image reproduction was crisp and clean, and the random cut made for piece shapes that were varied and interesting. This was one of the best quality Re-marks puzzle I’ve assembled in a while.

There were so many sections that brought back memories that it was difficult to decide which ones should get a closeup. This collage isn’t just movie monsters, it has novels, comic books, tv shows, cereal, songs, albums, and even candy! If I let myself go on and on about all the panels that I wanted to talk about this would be an unbelievably long post and you would most likely get quite bored before the end. In the end I narrowed it down to only three, but trust me I could talk about MANY more than ones shown below.

As a dyed-in-the-wool comedy nerd, of course Young Frankenstein (pronounced Fronkensteen) was going to be one of my choices. It’s an excellent movie, and besides being extremely funny it also makes me think of my boys – they both love this movie and they also love to quote from it, sometimes ad nauseam. Additionally, seeing the movie poster has me feeling my age a bit today, as every one of the talented actors shown here are now gone and it’s a bit sad.

Still, the movie makes me happy and I can’t hear “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and not think of Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder singing and dancing and in general being ridiculous. It makes me laugh out loud every single time I see it. 😂

My youngest son picked out this puzzle for me to assemble, and after I said I would do it he went to his room and brought me back a copy of Frankenstein with this exact cover that he had just gotten out of the library that day. He then proceeded to tell me ALL about the book, Mary Shelley, and the many Frankenstein movies that have been made. I got a 15 minute Frankenstein lecture! None of this was new to me, when I assembled The World of Frankenstein almost three years ago I got almost the same lecture about the book, it’s origins, the author, etc. But any time my baby boy wants to engage with me is good and I’d happily sit through the lecture again to spend time with him talking TO me instead of AT me.

When I saw this section of the puzzle it made me so happy! I can’t even begin to count the number of times I read this book to my kids – complete with voices and over-the-top acting on my part – they loved it, and so did I. We didn’t read it much at bedtime though; they got more excited the closer we got to the end of the book, I got louder too, and it wasn’t really conducive to winding down and going to sleep. This puzzle brought back such a good memory of sharing this book with my babies. 💕

I had the best time with this puzzle, the whole process made me happy. I don’t really want to take it apart yet, it was too much fun!