Review: Harvest Festival

harvest festival
Harvest Festival by Jonathan Green – Tidemark – 1000 pieces

Harvest Festival is a colorful, entertaining, and gorgeous puzzle that I enjoyed immensely! It combined the fun of working with such an interesting image with the challenge of a semi-random cut – and to top it off it was a very good quality puzzle. 🙂

Tidemark puzzles are a new to me company, and I was pretty impressed with both the image and the quality. The pieces are semi-randomly cut, a good thickness, and fit together quite well. The image reproduction is bright and colorful with crisp lines and very little glare. Their catalog is quite small with only 8 images to choose from, but if one of them strikes your fancy you should give it a try. (Most of them are a little muted for my taste, but there may be something you’d love to assemble.)

The wavy lines of color weren’t easy and got a little tedious on the last day of assembly, but I still love the image and am super proud of myself for sticking with it.

harvest festival 1

The artwork by Jonathan Green is so striking that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself; bright colors in a puzzle make me happy, and don’t we all need a little more happiness in our lives? I know I do. 🙂

Details:

  • Title:                  Harvest Festival
  • Artist:                Jonathan Green
  • Brand:               Tidemark
  • Piece count:     1000 pieces
  • Size:                  Approx. 19 x 27 in. (48 x 67 cm)
  • Purchased:      New

Quality:

  • Board:               Very good
  • Cutting:             Very good
  • Image:               Very good
  • Box:                   Average
  • Fit:                     Very good
  • Puzzle Dust:     Moderate amount
  • Piece cut:          Semi-random cut
  • Piece shapes:   Good variety
  • Finish:               Slightly shiny finish, lays flat

Overall Rating:      Very good, recommended

So Excited!

Sorry it’s taken so long to get today’s post published, but there’s exciting news to share! This morning mom came over and we put together the rest of the light colored section! *insert hilarious old lady happy dancing here*👵💃👵

She’s still here and we’re still working on it, but it’s definitely the sky portion of the image. Normally I would wait to post a picture from the entire day’s progress, but this is too exciting not to share!

mystery puzzle 8

You can see the symmetry in the image, and that there’s definitely going to be a building there! In fact, after I took this picture, mom found a couple of the pieces of the building that fit into what we have assembled so far. 😮 I wasn’t kidding about the color line cutting – a couple of the pieces that I pulled when we first started to show you that they cut along the outline of the building actually fit into our sky section!

mystery puzzle 1_li

These two pieces have NO light colored area on them at all, and fit perfectly into what we’ve already done! Devious!

The entire box seems to be only one puzzle, and there are MANY MANY MORE pieces left. We’re kind of at a loss of where to go from here. I almost want to go through the remaining pieces and sort again to see if we can find the pieces we’ve obviously missed, but that may not be the best use of our time.

Also, I’m very excited to have found a piece that has wording stamped into it, “Publishing Co.” is legible if you hold it at the right angle, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to find out what company made this puzzle! Two of the pieces have the word “Parker” written on the back of them, so it may be one of Parker’s “Pastime” puzzles from the early 1900’s. There’s so much mystery in our little mystery box!

We’re still deciding at the moment what comes next, but she’s so excited that she’s definitely going to be here for a while figuring out our strategy and hoping putting in lots of pieces!

Mystery Box – A Lighter Shade of Pale

mystery puzzle 6

Many people have asked if this puzzle is all one color, so I’ve tried to get a picture that shows clearly the shades and streaks. I did the best I could with my cellphone camera, but had to adjust the contrast, light, and clarity so that the differences were clear. Even with my lack of photographic skills I think you can see above that it isn’t all just flat color.

The color line cutting can make things tricky, they made cuts directly along the lines of color separation to keep you guessing – and it works! From the look of the assembled sections so far we believe that this large lightly colored area is perhaps the sky portion of a much larger image. Of course we won’t know for sure until it’s finished, but it’s definitely keeping us guessing. 🙂

The mystery of this puzzle and the fun of sitting in front of it and searching for connections has kept me occupied this past week, and I’ve been neglecting all other puzzling. I haven’t finished any puzzles in more than 7 days now! 😱

Harry Potter Book 3

harry potter book 3
Harry Potter Book 3 by Mary GrandPre – NY Puzzle Co. – 100 pieces

These Harry Potter cover puzzles are harder than they look, but so much fun! The colors are beautiful, the quality is excellent, and they’re small enough to finish with a cup of coffee. 🙂

I’ve read all the books several times, and to be honest I never really paid attention to the detail on the covers before – but you absolutely have to pay attention when you’re putting these together. I’m a puzzler, so you would think I have some eye for detail, but I never noticed the shadow of Sirius Black in the window before!

Or perhaps I did register it, but my muddled brain didn’t keep that information on file. Who knows? Obviously, not me!

Mystery Box – Day 8

mystery puzzle 5

It’s coming together slowly, and at first after taking the picture this morning it didn’t seem to be very much progress. Then I went and looked at the picture from 3 days ago, and it’s filling in much more than I’d realized….

It’s sort of like when you see something every day you don’t notice the slow change. But when you put the pictures together you can really see the progress. Mom came over yesterday and worked on it while I slept in the other room and put lots of pieces together – good job Mom, thanks for taking up the slack! 🙂