The Cake Off – In Progress

On January 27, 2019 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzling2 Comments

I’ve been sidelined for the last few days with a doozy of a cold, and haven’t touched my puzzle in progress. I did manage to do a bit of sorting early this morning when I couldn’t sleep, and finally got some pieces put together!

It’s a little more challenging for me than normal, because I don’t have any trays to lay out the pieces, scrabbling through the box trying to find things is NOT how I like to work. All of my trays (and some borrowed from mom) are being used on the mystery box puzzle, so I’m having to try to assemble this puzzle in a completely different way. Ick.

This puzzle is perfect for me at the moment; it’s from Ravensburger’s What If series and it’s called The Cake Off. My husband and I have been watching The Great British Baking Show the past few weeks, and this image is a send up of that series. We love the show, so I was pleasantly surprised when the next puzzle in the series for me to assemble was this one. 🙂

It’s been relatively untouched for 3 days, but I’m hoping to be able to do a little more work on it today. Can’t wait to see what happens at The Cake Off!

Harry Potter Book 4

On January 26, 2019 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw PuzzlesLeave a comment

Not as quick and simple as your usual 100 piece children’s puzzle, the image gives you a bit of a cerebral workout – or maybe I’m losing brain cells at a faster rate than I’d thought. 😉

These Harry Potter puzzles are one of my favorite Christmas presents this year, I’m having a great time with them. Thank you very much my beautiful daughter. ❤

*I apologize for another short post, I’m still trying to get over this bleeping cold*

Knightingale

On January 25, 2019 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles8 Comments

Knightingale was a fun image with beautiful colors and interesting artwork; unfortunately it also had poor quality too. There was a great deal of image lift which robbed me of the joy I get when running my hands over the completed puzzle – there were too many tabs sticking up and I didn’t want my puzzle massage to tear any of them off. Still it was a great find at the thrift store, I got several hours of enjoyable puzzle time for only 69 cents!

The artist may have been inspired by Picasso – or this scene is set somewhere near a leaking nuclear reactor. Fun characters with interesting colors, I’d love to find more puzzles with her artwork – it was even more fun to assemble than I’d hoped. 🙂

Off to the Market!

On January 24, 2019 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles7 Comments

First completed wooden puzzle of the year. So cute! It has lovely bright colors, and excellent quality. I love this image too, so many adorable puppies!

off to the market! whimsies

Please forgive the shortness of today’s post, I’ve come down with quite a cold/virus and am feeling terrible. I miss being able to breathe through my sinuses! 🤕

Mystery Box – Day 13

On January 23, 2019 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzling2 Comments

mystery puzzle 9

It’s looking pretty good, right? We put all the rest of the pieces on trays, filled in all the holes we had, and started working on the actual image. We assembled some smaller roof sections (not shown), and started working on the symmetrical pieces, trying to find the interesting shapes that fit into and around them, like the ones below.

mystery puzzle 10

It’s not as easy as you might think to find the right pieces; back in the days of hand cut wooden puzzles they did their very best to make things as challenging as possible. Many times what fits insides these spaces are two pieces cut so that it almost obscures the shape you think you’re looking for. Talk about focusing the mind! You’ve got to have pretty intense concentration when you’re working on this puzzle! (That’s part of the fun for us though, we’re loving it 💞) There are about 35 or 40 more symmetrical pieces in this sort of style, but they all look very different! For a black and white photograph like the one we’re working on it seems the easiest place to start.

We also found 3 American flags that have the hand coloring (painting) on them, they really stood out!

mystery puzzle 11

I can’t say for certain, but to me it looks as if they were painted directly onto the puzzle. It’s so interesting! When we first saw it, I thought some idiot had marked up one of the pieces with an ink pen. Thank goodness that wasn’t the case. 😉

We took good pictures of the sky before we started adding pieces, because we want to get a piece count. We we smarter this time and counted the pieces as we were putting them on trays, but we’ve got to go back and count the ones we’ve already assembled. They won’t be easy to count, so I think it’ll work best to print pictures of the sections so we can mark them as we’re counting and don’t lose track.

I’m guessing the total is going to be around 1500 pieces. We had 1125 on trays, plus the sky sections. I’m surprised by that number though, I thought it would have been more. Perhaps it’s because many of the pieces are quite large, especially the symmetrical ones; it seems as though it should be much more than 1500 pieces. It’s a big one!

We’re having a blast with this project, and I hope you’re enjoying reading about it and seeing the pictures too. ☺