Usually for a 300 piece puzzle it gets finished the day that I start it, but this one has been on my board for 2 days now. It’s been a horrible week, but I’ve made it a point to get myself into the puzzle room at least once a day and do SOMETHING with a puzzle; whether it’s sorting pieces or putting a few of them together, as long as I got a little bit accomplished it helped.
I started with the more difficult side, the brush strokes make it a bit more of a challenge – but there’s fun in the harder ones, and every piece placed is a little victory. And once that side is finished the bright colors and interesting patterns on the opposite side should make for much quicker assembly.
So this beauty is still in progress, but hopefully I’ll be able to stay awake during the day and get it finished. You can’t really tell from the picture, but it’s a beautiful image, it’ll be gorgeous when it’s done. 🙂
Good Housekeeping Collection – New York Puzzle Company – 1000 pieces
I absolutely loved this puzzle, both because it was a collage and great fun and because it brought back memories. It was assembled once already. My mom and daughter did the majority of the assembly and I came in at the end and helped out; I didn’t feel as though I actually assembled it since they did most of the work, so it didn’t make it onto the blog. I have great memories of the three generations of women working on this together, and it’s a puzzle I will never get rid of.
I’ve done quite a few NY Puzzle Company puzzles, and I really like them. Their catalog has a lot of magazine covers, and I find they are great fun to assemble. The quality is very good too; thick pieces, very nice fit, and great image reproduction. I’ve never had a bad experience with this brand, which is something I can’t say about most of the brands I’ve assembled.
I just loved the look of this cover, how both the woman’s dress and the dog’s coat blend into the background color. (Plus, you can’t go wrong with a dog!) Several of the covers were the same, where the background color is the same as the clothes of the women so that they blend together.
I also was glad to see that not every cover is about fashion or cooking or some other “ladylike” pursuit – we ladies can do so much more than that! There were several covers of women doing things like working on a car tire, and even what I think was a suffragette being hauled off to prison. I like it!
My mother loved this puzzle, and that’s probably part of why I loved it too. It was great quality, a fun assembly, and a wonderfully challenging image – but even more than that it reminds me of her. She put this one together with my daughter and I before, but she loved it so much that she didn’t re-donate it, I found it at her house with her things. It’s a keeper for me, definitely.
Forest Animals by Natasha Chetkova – Cardinal – 100 pieces
Quick little puzzle on a day when I just needed to put a few pieces together. Kids puzzles are perfect for a quick fix for us puzzle junkies. 😉
The completed puzzle didn’t lay flat, there were several bent pieces, and yet it was still fun to assemble. I loved the image too, it was different and I love different.
Cardinal puzzles are fine to get from the thrift store, but if I were buying a puzzle specifically for a child I would absolutely choose another brand – one that takes pride in making quality puzzles. Ravensburger and Melissa & Doug are the first ones that come to mind, but there are plenty of brands out there that do a much better job than Cardinal.
I have been having one of the worst days in quite a while – full of pain, anxiety, stress, and just in general a terrible day. It was even too much for me to get my regular blog post out this morning, my apologies for the delay, it truly has been an awful day.
But even with everything going on, as long as I could get myself into the puzzle room and sit down in front of the board, everything negative starts fading a little bit into the background. I open a new puzzle, see the pieces and colors and hold them in my hands, and the world seems a little less stressful. What better hobby could there be? I can’t think of one.
Even just a few minutes with some puzzle pieces takes my mind off of everything else, and things seem a little more tolerable. I opened a box, and there’s peace and calm for me inside; I get to bring order to the chaos, put together a beautiful picture, and in doing so find much relief from the stresses and anxieties of the day.
My husband surprised me with this puzzle; and not only was I surprised that he bought it for me, I was surprised that he picked such a great image too. It turned out to be a fantastic, well-made, very challenging puzzle and I absolutely loved it. Well done hubby!
The image is of the Prague clock, which I knew nothing about when I received this puzzle, but it lead me to do some research on it and I was fascinated. It was built in 1410, and is the oldest working astronomical clock in the world! The clock face gives you all sorts of information; if you know how to read it you can tell the date, how long until sunrise or sunset, the location of the Sun on the ecliptic (which tells you the date in relation to the sign of the zodiac), what lunar phase the moon is currently in, and, oh yes, it tells time too (both current standard time and Ancient Bohemian Time). It makes for a great puzzle image too!
Nautilus puzzles is a newer wooden puzzle company, started in 2018. I was highly impressed by the quality of the puzzles, but even more so by the cut of the pieces. The cut is exceptional; it is designed so that every single piece touches at least one of the whimsy pieces – which makes for wonderfully varied shapes and a much more challenging assembly. Their catalog is large and varied as well, and along with some images you see quite often in puzzles they’ve got some very unique images as well. They weren’t in business when I started my wooden jigsaw puzzle experimentthree years ago, because I definitely would have given these a try. Their smallest puzzles start at around $15, which is quite affordable in my book.
If you’re into astrology, you’ll recognize many of the whimsy shapes. I recognized the zodiac symbols, but not all the rest of them.
This is quite a large number of whimsies for only a 500 piece puzzle, and they all match the “theme” of the image. It was fun to sort through the pieces and find all the interesting whimsies, it’s one of my favorite parts of working with wooden puzzles. 🙂
All the whimsies were themed towards time, astrology, astronomy, etc. In this corner you can see the phases of the moon! That’s going an extra step, instead of just throwing whimsies around in between pieces they’ve put some thought into the design. It made for quite an entertaining assembly, and I will definitely be buying another puzzle from this company.
Hubby did an awesome job picking out this puzzle, it was a joy to assemble and I absolutely loved it! It was exceptionally well made, expertly designed, and was great fun to put together – it is very highly recommended!
*Also, as usual, I recommend giving wooden puzzles a try if you haven’t before. There are many affordable companies out there, like Nautilus, and we puzzlers are definitely worth a splurge now and then. If you can’t bring yourself to buy one, how about requesting one for a birthday or Christmas present? You’re so worth it!
Details:
Title: Prague Clock
Artist: Unknown
Brand: Nautilus Puzzles
Piece count: 500 pieces
Size: Approx. 19 x 14 in. (48 x 36 cm)
Purchased: New
Quality:
Board: Excellent, 4mm thick wood
Cutting: Excellent
Image: Excellent
Box: Very good, pieces come in a cloth bag
Fit: Excellent
Puzzle Dust: None
Piece cut: Random cut with whimsies
Piece shapes: Excellent variety
Finish: Slightly shiny finish
Overall Rating: Excellent, most highly recommended
