Hello Fall In Progress…

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw PuzzlingLeave a comment

Hello Fall – MicroPuzzles – 150 pieces

I know I told you that after the last puzzle there was a 1000 piece all sorted and ready to go, and that’s still true. But I kinda got in my own way here and have taken a small detour before we get to that big’un.

The week hasn’t been much fun for me and there hasn’t been much puzzling. Yesterday was particularly difficult and I spent it almost entirely in bed, but I did get up for a few minutes and got myself into the puzzle room to get a small puzzle that I could do lying down – one of my 80 piece puzzle packs from MicroPuzzles.

But once I got that one finished I kept looking at it to see all the differences between the puzzle packs and their 150 piece test tube puzzles. Which led me to telling myself that I needed to do one of the test tube puzzles so I could show the differences close up in a post. That has led to where I am now, partway through this 150 piece fall puzzle. I didn’t get very far before I ended up back in bed, but it’s a start!

You can’t tell much from my picture, but the image is adorable and looks as though it will be very entertaining and engrossing to assemble. Hopefully after a medication adjustment I’ll be back at the puzzle board in no time. First I gotta finish this little one coffee puzzle so we can all say Hello Fall!

Jungle Guardian

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles5 Comments

Jungle Guardian by Jim Salvati – Mega Puzzles (Multipack) – 500 pieces

Without having completed all the puzzles in this multipack I can confidently say this is by far the most difficult of the bunch! All these muted colors, brush strokes, and lack of variety in piece shape made for quite a challenge. Good thing the Puzzle Goddess hasn’t lost too much of her mojo. 🧩👑

I was actually looking for a challenge when I chose this puzzle, and boy did I find it. It was harder than I expected, and I expected it to be quite hard. I wasn’t counting on those brush strokes, they made it quite a formidable solve.

It was my mistake thinking this would be like the other Disney puzzles in this box, a computer generated image – this one and the other 500 piece puzzle both have artwork done by actual people and that makes them much more of a task in my opinion. I’m not a fan of fine art puzzles mostly for this reason, the brush strokes make each piece seem like just a blob of color and my poor old eyes just can’t quite see the image in there anymore.

One of the reasons this was so difficult was the piece shapes; this puzzle only had ballerinas in two shapes, one was taller and fatter, one longer and thinner. But they weren’t as easy to distinguish from one another as I would have liked. I separated them by those shapes, and there were quite a few I missed or just plain ‘ol got wrong because the shapes were so similar. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it would have been better if they’d been more like the shapes in a Puzzlebug puzzle; the taller, fatter ones could never get mixed up with their longer, skinnier ones – that would have helped a bit with this puzzle.

Even though it was tough I still enjoyed the challenge of it – and I can’t tell you how happy I was when I finally finished Bagheera, he was the hardest part of the whole thing! The rush of dopamine it sent my brain was amazing, I was so proud.

Favorite Cereals

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles2 Comments

Favorite Cereals by Doug Banks – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

Bright colors, cartoons, collage, relatively good quality – just what was needed for a fun puzzle experience for me. I took it slowly and enjoyed every single piece, I even enjoyed the sorting!

This White Mountain puzzle was pretty good quality other than a slightly loose fit. The image reproduction is excellent, even with closeup images, the piece shapes are the usual WM shapes, and the entire puzzle was joy to put together. Those of us who grew up in the US should be quite familiar with most of these cereals, but they may not be as readily available in the rest of the world. Whether you know the cereals or not though, the image itself makes for a great puzzle.

Has anyone ever seen this cereal out in the wild? I’ve never even heard of it before. My son looked it up for me and apparently she’s a sister cereal to FrankenBerry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula. She’s a monster, obviously, not sure what kind though. Her cereal is a caramel apple flavor with the usual dehydrated marshmallows. I’m not sure how appetizing that sounds to you, but to me – not so much. I love caramel apples, but if you add milk and marshmallows I’m not sure that adds up to something I’d like to eat. How about you?

Of course I know Cookie Crisp cereal, but I haven’t seen this mascot before. Apparently his name is Chip and he’s the current mascot of the brand and has been since 2005. That tells me how much streaming has taken over my viewing habits. I almost never watch actual television channels anymore, and I certainly don’t have to sit through commercials if I do record something on the dvr. Basically what I’m saying is that I haven’t seen a commercial for this cereal in many years and had no idea that Chip is their current spokes-animal. He’s kinda cute.

This is a great puzzle and even with the slightly loose fit it was fun to put together. It would be a great for a beginning puzzler, or someone who wants to move up to 1000 piece puzzles but is hesitant or thinks they won’t be able to get it done. The bright colors and many small sections could help alleviate any anxiety one might have about a larger piece count. Even so, as an extremely experienced puzzler it was still completely enjoyable, and not always as easy as you might think. This one is definitely recommended.

Flight of Creativity In Progress…

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzling4 Comments

Flight of Creativity by Jena Dellagrottaglia – MasterPieces – 300 pieces

After completing the previous puzzle I had no idea what I wanted to do next. All I knew is that I had forgotten to choose and sort the next project and I was NOT in a place where I could sort a 1000 piece puzzle, so I had to pick something with a much smaller piece count to get myself going. Funnily enough I started this puzzle, put in enough pieces to where it was time to sort the next one – and sorted a 1000 piece puzzle all in that same day!

Sadly, that was where it ended; and even though I’m ready to start the next one I’m still recovering this morning from sitting in that puzzle chair for way too long yesterday. I’ve taken my meds and waiting for them to kick in – then we’ll be off to the races today to get this one (hopefully) finished and start on the gorgeous collage that will be next.

This image is beautiful, I love all the colors and sewing supplies, and can’t wait to see it all put together. I’m currently loving all the MasterPieces I’ve done lately, and it looks as though this one has the same great quality. The fit is exceptional and it’s been great fun so far, couldn’t ask for anything more. 😎

The Global Puzzle

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles2 Comments

The Global Puzzle – A Broader View – 600 pieces

Does this look like fun to any of you? I wasn’t so sure about it myself, but was intrigued by the box and that the pieces were shaped like countries, states, and provinces so I picked it up at the thrift store. For some reason I really wanted to do this puzzle at this moment, and I’m so glad I did because it was super annoying – but so fun at the same time!

I’ve done only two other puzzles from this brand, A Broader View, and both of those were circular puzzles; this one was a completely different beast. The fit was quite loose, but this puzzle is 13 years old and looks as if it’s been put together many, many times. The edges and all the ocean pieces interlock, but the countries themselves just sit next to each other as the pieces are shaped like the countries they represent. This is meant to be an educational puzzle, so if the pieces connected together you would have hints to which country is next to another – it’s better for learning the geography if there aren’t hints like that.

That the countries don’t interlock is what made working on this puzzle so annoying, but somehow it made me so happy to assemble it anyway. I sorted the pieces very generally at first; all the countries have colors so those all went together, the edge pieces of course, anything with the black or white border that wasn’t an edge, and finally ocean pieces. The number of very large pieces and very tiny pieces was amazing; here’s one of the largest shown with one of the smallest…

Nova Scotia looks teeny tiny next to India, and the difference in sizes between many large countries and smaller island countries for instance was amazing.

The back of the box tells you that it is recommended that you start with the outer black frame, move on to the oceans, and then finish with the land pieces. That was my plan, but as you know sometimes the puzzle leads you another way. The outer frame went together with no problems, but assembling the oceans was tedious.

You can see here that on the ocean pieces is a listing for each country that shows the capital city, the population, and the area in square miles. Putting all of these in alphabetical order and completing just the ocean first would be a giant slog – at least it seemed that way to me. So instead after the border I started at the top with Greenland and moved down to North America. Once those pieces were in place I then went through all the ocean pieces and picked out the countries from A-G that I could find and assembled the Pacific Ocean. I then continued with South America and repeated with country information in the Atlantic Ocean.

You can see here how none of the states connect and how it could be (and was) annoying that pieces moved around whenever a new one was found and inserted into the image.

The larger countries like Brazil, Russia, China, Australia, etc. did have some pieces that connected to each other but none that connected to other countries. This is the first half of the puzzle done, and I again had the help of my youngest son, which made me quite happy. He was intrigued by this puzzle, and helped me out by getting my magnifying glass, studying the box, and telling me the order of the countries alphabetically so that I could put the oceans together without having to consult the box myself. He also put together almost all of South America by himself while I was taking a break and resting in bed. I love that he seems to be more interested in puzzles lately!

There was something about this puzzle that my son and I absolutely loved and it was so hard to walk away from! I would have taken more breaks than I did, but my son would come back to the puzzle room and want to help some more and I just didn’t want to break the spell.

Also, this puzzle is quite large at 3 feet x 1.5 feet (91 cm x 46 cm), so be sure you have a large enough work space. It fit on my smaller puzzle board with only a few inches to spare on either side!

Unfortunately it was missing one piece, the small island nation of Tuvalu located in the South Pacific (the right side of the puzzle). But even though it was missing I did learn that Tuvalu is only 10 square miles in area, and has a population around 10,000 people; I just love an educational puzzle.💖

This would make a wonderful addition to a classroom as an excellent educational resource. I’m sending it back to the thrift store with a small note written on the box denoting a missing piece with the space circled showing where. Even with a missing piece this puzzle was entertaining, educational, and just plain ‘ol fun!