Alice’s Adventures…In Progress…

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw PuzzlingLeave a comment

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Anna Stead – Gibsons – 1000 pieces

This was shipped to my home as an early birthday present, and knowing it was puzzles OF COURSE I didn’t wait until my birthday to open them. Duh. Thanks for the thoughtful gift Penny, I’m having a great time with this one!

The scrolls with the words were much more of a challenge than I thought; even though putting the quotes together was no problem at all, the rest of the scroll with no words and plenty of color changes were more difficult than I gave them credit for. At one point I’d assembled the words and pulled out what I thought to be most of the pieces with scroll on them – and it was just too difficult for me to place many pieces at all. I kinda gave up on that after a while and focused on filling in other sections first. After a bit I began to find a few pieces here and there and eventually sorted the scroll pieces by shape and only tried to place them when I could be sure of the shape or coloring I was looking for.

Sometimes I get it into my head how something should go together and I stick to it even though it takes way more time than it should and is obviously, eventually, the wrong way to go. That’s how I started out this puzzle, and even though I knew I was doing it and it was taking a ridiculous amount of time – I still continued to do it! Sometimes I’m a stubborn ol’ cow, and I just have to blunder through everything my enormously stupid way until I come to my senses.

I’m down to two trays of pieces left, which means I’m now sorting my next puzzle before I can finish this one. My next one will be section B of the big Disney puzzle, Alice in Wonderland. If things keep going the way they are it’s gonna take a while to sort; I’ve been sorting since yesterday but keep getting exhausted and start yawning and end up needing a nap.💤🛌💤

Then again, I’m so anxious to hurry up and get back to this gorgeous puzzle that maybe the sorting won’t take as long as I thought. Here’s hoping!

Whatever puzzle you’re working on today, happy puzzling my friends! 🧩💚

Flight of Creativity

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles4 Comments

Flight of Creativity by Jena Dellagrottaglia – MasterPieces – 300 pieces

Gorgeous, colorful, bright, beautiful, quality – so many words to describe this stunner of a puzzle. Loved every piece from beginning to end.

This is one time where I think it was the perfect piece count. Many times I’ve wished for a puzzle that was great fun to be available in a larger size so that I could work on it longer and enjoy the process even more; and sometimes I’ve wished that a puzzle had fewer pieces because it was so challenging or frustrating. This one though, 300 seems like the exact right amount of pieces. I think in a higher count it would have been more difficult, perhaps so much so that it would have become frustrating and taken away from the joy of the assembly.

Assembling larger puzzles is difficult for me at times, especially when I’m having trouble with my chronic pain or depression. It’s so nice to have a choice of smaller piece counts here so that I can continue to puzzle even when puzzling is challenging for me.

Defence Against the Dark Arts

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles4 Comments

Defence Against the Dark Arts – Wentworth Wooden Puzzles – 500 pieces

Is this not a fantastic image for the month of October? I think it is, so here we are. Honestly I wasn’t sure how this one was going to go for me, as there is a LOT of black in it even though it seems very colorful and I wasn’t sure how these aging eyes of mine would deal with all the darkness. Luckily with the help of some eyeglasses and an excellent light source it wasn’t too bad at all. 👓🕯

I cannot be held responsible for this puzzle purchase as every Harry Potter puzzle on the Wentworth website was 70% off back in June, and I was left unsupervised with access to my bank account. Consequently, of the fourteen puzzles that were available nine of them made it into my shopping cart. Getting a QUALITY 500 piece wooden puzzle for such a great price was just too good to pass up, so I didn’t! I bought many different sizes: two 500 pieces, a 450, a 225, a set of four 65 pieces, and several 250’s (which I consider to be the perfect size for a Wentworth). This is the second puzzle from this purchase that I’ve assembled, and it was an absolute joy.

If you read My Jigsaw Journal regularly you might remember this picture from the in progress post I did back in August when this puzzle was assembled. The whimsies in this puzzle are absolutely fabulous – with images of Dumbledore, Voldemort, Snape, and even Crookshanks, Scabbers, and Hedwig,. I love all of these figures, and truly appreciate all the work that must have gone into them.

I’m not sure what it is that I love so much about this little section, I just know that it makes me happy even just to look at it. It was a lot of fun to put together and still makes me smile even as I’m typing this up. 😍

Normally I show the entire back of a wooden puzzle, especially when the shapes are Victorian cut or just interesting to me. The shapes for most of these pieces were “normal” and so even though I took a picture of the back I decided to only show you this little part of it. You couldn’t tell unless you were really paying attention, but Scabbers’ whiskers extend into two of the pieces next to him. I didn’t notice at all until I flipped it over. There are a few of these extensions into surrounding pieces for a couple of the other whimsies as well. It makes me really appreciate all the work that went into these puzzles, even more than I already did!

For some reason I just dumped out all the pieces onto my board and flipped them over with no sorting, not even the edges. It was chaos! As the assembly went on I realized that 500 pieces is a bit too many for me to puzzle that way. It’s ok with a smaller piece count, but for this stuck-in-her-ways old lady, I think anything over 300 pieces will need to be sorted from now on. Lesson learned.

Chaos not withstanding, this puzzle made me tremendously happy. Buying it made me happy. Looking at the box made me happy. Finding all the whimsy pieces made me happy. And assembling it made me very happy. 😄

Who’s Your Doggy? In Progress…

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzling2 Comments

Who’s Your Doggy? by Graffie*tee Studios – Buffalo – 750 pieces

This puzzle is so entertaining! The colors, the dog’s faces, the quality – and did I mention the dog’s faces? The cuteness factor is off the charts!

It’s been going together rather haphazardly, as you can probably tell from the picture. But it all seems quite natural as it’s happening. Normally I would try to find as many pieces for each section as I could before starting to assemble them, but I’m just putting pieces in as I find them and having a grand old time. 😁

I’ve been watching old dog shows on one of my streaming services lately, maybe that’s why I chose this puzzle yesterday. With all those sweet, lovable faces I just couldn’t resist. It’ll be finished pretty quickly I’m sure, because I can’t seem to keep my hands off it. It’s just too much fun. 🥰

Office Space

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles8 Comments

Office Space – Cardinal – 500 pieces

This puzzle was unbelievably frustrating, to say the least! But I loved the movie and really wanted to get another thrift store puzzle done and out of here to help clear off my shelves. So even though I knew it would be tough, off we went!

Cardinal puzzles are on the lower end of the scale as far as quality goes, in my opinion. I’ve actually done some of their puzzles that have been really good, but most are just fair. There is a good variety of piece shapes, but the image reproduction can sometimes be fuzzy making it more difficult to build your image, and the fit is many times loose and floppy, making it a nightmare to move pieces around. This one was unfortunately on the low end of the scale, with an extremely loose fit and indistinct and blurry image.

Nevertheless I jumped right in, knowing it would be a rough assembly. I’m not sure if I wanted to challenge myself or if I just really wanted to do it and be done with it. Whichever reason spurred me on, I’m glad I did it – and my youngest once again helped me with it. Not only did he help, he came in to assist at the most difficult part – when all that was left were white pieces that I had to sort by shape in order to fill it in!

After completing everything with color there were approximately 140-150 pieces that were pure white and I sorted them by shape in order to finish without tearing out my very gray hair. Because the fit was so loose and floppy, it made finding the right pieces even more difficult. At times there could be many pieces that all seemed to fit in one spot. Unbelievably frustrating.

So I found an image online of a completed puzzle and used that to at least let me know what shape I was looking for. You may consider that “cheating”, but there actually is no such thing as cheating when jigsaw puzzling – unless you’re in a competition. Slogging through 150 pieces of solid white with a fit you can’t be sure of wasn’t my idea of a good time, so I used the image of the finished puzzle to find what piece shape I should be looking for and completed the puzzle that way. My son helped during this last stage, and together we got it done in pretty good time.

This is only the second time I’ve used this technique. The first time I used it was when one of the sections of the giant Disney puzzle fell when I was trying to get a good picture; 4,032 pieces fell everywhere and weeks of work went down the drain. Even thinking about it now makes me anxious and upset! Anyway, there were a couple of pictures taken before it fell, so I used them to help me re-assemble the section quickly. It wasn’t cheating then, and it isn’t cheating now, not in my mind at least.

So even though the white pieces weren’t much fun at all the puzzle wasn’t too terrible, and I’m happy that it’s done and on it’s way out of my house and back to the thrift store. 😁