Today is my Grama’s birthday. Since she’s been on my mind, especially since last week’s National Puzzle Day post I decided to do a post on this puzzle.  It belonged to Gram. My mom decided to keep this puzzle of hers to assemble and glue. Mom did most of the assembly, but I did help and I glued and helped frame it.

Charles Wysocki’s artwork is a favorite, so this was an obvious choice to keep and it is a mosaic puzzle which was interesting to us, we’ve never seen that before. This is a Milton Bradley puzzle made in the 70’s. While doing research to find the name of this image I found that Milton Bradley made a few of these mosaic puzzles. I can’t imagine they were popular or a good seller, because OH MY GOODNESS was it horrible to work!

The pieces are in square shapes as you can see from the picture above, and nothing clicks together. This may seem like a good idea in theory, it looks like a mosaic tile work, how fun! NOPE. Every piece just lays next to the adjacent piece and heaven forbid you bump the table or the puzzle itself! We had to be extremely careful, and even the gluing was a chore and required both of us.

While we enjoyed the artwork and the pieces were thick enough, those were the only good things about this puzzle. A mosaic puzzle is not a good idea in my opinion, there needs to be some way to attach the pieces together or it just becomes a chore and is not fun at all. Fun is the reason we do puzzles in the first place!

This was a puzzle that belonged to Grama though, and that’s why we assembled it. My mother and I both love puzzles because of her, what a great gift! Thanks Gram, Happy Birthday!