Month: April 2018

Frozen

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store PuzzlesLeave a comment
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Frozen – Clementoni – 104 pieces

This was the first Clementoni puzzle for children that I’ve assembled and I was pretty impressed with the quality – very nice!

The pieces were thick and fit together very well, and the image reproduction was absolutely beautiful. I love the companies that make excellent quality kids puzzles, and Clementoni is one of them. What a let down that a piece was missing and it can’t be passed along so that other kids could appreciate it.

I enjoy putting together kids puzzles. Although I am checking to be sure all the pieces are there before passing it on, I actually look forward to working with them too. It’s nice to start and finish a puzzle in one “sitting”, and the images are usually fun and brightly colored. A puzzle is a puzzle in my book, whether there are 24 or 24,000 pieces. I’m not too grown up to admit I have a good time assembling them and I don’t feel that working them is beneath me or too boring. I’m just a big kid anyway!

One of these days I’m going to have to see this movie; I must have done 5 or 6 Frozen puzzles in the last year and I’m wondering why it’s so popular. All my children are in their mid to late 20’s and I haven’t seen a kids movie in a while. Although I must admit that even though I enjoy kids puzzles I’m not that much of a movie buff and have to be in exactly the right mood to watch them. For now I’ll just stick with the puzzles. 😁

Review: Heart of the Garden

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Puzzle reviews2 Comments
This post is sponsored by Puzzle Warehouse.
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Heart of the Garden by Nancy Wernersbach – Sunsout – 200 pieces

Heart of the Garden is a beautiful shaped puzzle that was just the right amount of challenging – I enjoyed the assembly very much.

Shaped puzzles are quite fun in my opinion; I enjoy the added difficulty of not having straight edges, but it’s still a jigsaw puzzle and I know how to do those! I can’t seem to break myself from trying to find and assemble the edges first even though it’s not the quickest way to work a shaped puzzle. It doesn’t really matter though, as long as I’m having fun I’m doing it right. Have you tried a shaped puzzle? There are so many interesting shapes and images to choose from. You can start small with less than 100 pieces, or go big with 1000 – it’s all up to you. Click to check out all the shaped puzzles currently available at Puzzle Warehouse.

Sunsout puzzles are very good quality, and they have the largest catalog of shaped puzzles that I’ve found. The pieces are a good thickness with a nice variety of shapes, and they fit together very well. Sometimes the fit of their puzzles is very tight but I found the fit of this puzzle to be just about perfect. I found a piece or two that was slightly bent, but these things happen with shipping and storage; it took no effort to put them right and the image looks perfect to me. Click the link above to see all of their puzzles in stock now at Puzzle Warehouse, both shaped and straight-edged.

The beautiful colors in this image are what drew me in, it’s really quite striking and made for an interesting and entertaining assembly. As usual I tried to start with the edges, because I’m stubborn as a mule and that’s how I have to do things. It’s more difficult with a shaped puzzle – not only because the edges are shaped, but because the actual shape can be moved and manipulated and you never get it just right until the interior pieces are put in. It keeps my brain cells working and keeps me completely absorbed in the assembly till the last piece – puzzle meditation. It’s a gorgeous image and the assembly was great, I definitely recommend this puzzle!

Details:

  • Title:                  Heart of the Garden
  • Artist:                Nancy Wernersbach
  • Brand:               Sunsout
  • Piece count:     200 pieces
  • Size:                  Approx. 11 x 18 in. (28 x 46 cm)
  • Purchased:      N/A, sent for review

Quality:

  • Board:               Good
  • Cutting:             Good
  • Image:               Very good
  • Box:                   Average, quite large for a 200 piece puzzle
  • Fit:                     Very good
  • Puzzle Dust:     Moderate amount
  • Piece cut:          Random cut
  • Piece shapes:   Very good variety
  • Finish:               Slightly shiny finish, lays flat

Overall Rating:      Very good, recommended

 

I received this product at no cost in order to facilitate this review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are truthful and 100% my own.

Pattern 4

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles2 Comments
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Pattern 4 by Patchwork – Milton Bradley – 300 pieces

I am completely in LOVE with this image! It isn’t my best picture – it’s a bit fuzzy at the bottom, which I didn’t notice until I had already disassembled it. My apologies. 😪

This Milton Bradley puzzle was very good quality, I was impressed! The pieces have an excellent feel to them and are a good thickness. The fit was exceptional – you can barely see the piece shapes in the finished puzzle – it would be perfect to frame and hang as artwork. The colors are amazing as well, and it made for an all around wonderful assembly.

When I was a child my mom used to buy these extremely interesting “coloring books”. They weren’t your typical pictures for children; they were intricate patterns to fill in with color, very much like the patterns in this puzzle. We weren’t even allowed to color in the book itself (it was more like a pad of paper than a book), she would photocopy the pattern and we could color on the copies only.

For me it was much more fascinating to color these patterns than the average coloring book for children and I spent many an hour with my colored pencils or crayons designing new color palettes for my favorite patterns. Mom was a pretty smart cookie to copy the pages, it made only a couple of these books last us for years.

This puzzle was exactly what I was looking for and I had the best time putting it together! It was part of a recent group of smaller piece count puzzles that I purchased to keep me stocked up while waiting for my puzzle mojo to come back. I’m so glad that I found this one, because it was so entertaining to assemble and the image is absolutely gorgeous. Now I’m on the hunt for patterns 1-3!

Private Library

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles2 Comments
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Private Library – Springbok – 500 pieces

I usually have relatively strong feelings either way about the puzzles I’ve assembled. It’s usually “loved it” or “where is the lighter fluid?”. For some reason this puzzle just makes me think “meh”; I’m even feeling blah about typing up this post. 😐

Springbok has some great puzzles, and although I’m not a fan of the super tight fit I’ve had a great time putting together many different Springbok images. There’s something about this one though, it just seems neither here nor there. It’s pretty, but wasn’t overly inspiring or entertaining to assemble. It could very well be that I was just in the wrong state of mind when putting it together; or it might be that this image just didn’t make for the kind of puzzle that I enjoy.

This puzzle is from the late 80’s, and the quality was good. The fit was extremely tight, but the pieces were very thick with an excellent variety of piece shapes. The image itself is quite dark, but the finished puzzle is actually very pretty.

You can’t fall in love with them all; if there aren’t any valleys you wouldn’t know how much you should appreciate the peaks, right?

Construction Crowd

On By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store PuzzlesLeave a comment
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Construction Crowd by Michael Searle – Ravensburger – 60 pieces

This puzzle was a fun image to assemble, even though there was a missing piece. I think all the children’s puzzles mom bought from the thrift store that day might have come from the same child – perhaps they didn’t take care of their puzzles. Or it could just be that they were roughly handled at the thrift store, you never know.

As usual with a Ravensburger puzzle the quality was excellent. I didn’t think I’d enjoy the image as much as I did; assembling the different vehicles was a lot of fun! I’m not sure if I’d want it as a larger piece count puzzle, but for only 60 pieces I found it pretty entertaining. 😎

If you’ve got a little one in your life who enjoys construction vehicles and puzzles, this one is definitely recommended.