My Favorite Color by Velvet Spectrum – Buffalo – 300 pieces
This gorgeous image is turning out to be easier than I thought it would be – so far. Finding the right colors hasn’t been too difficult, and what you see here went together really quickly. I didn’t finish sorting until this morning, and put this together in just a few minutes.
Once I start trying to assemble those large words it may become more of a challenge, but you never know. At least I never seem to know what images will be easy or hard, usually my perception of how it will go together turns out to be wrong.
Oh well, it’s fun to be surprised by puzzles sometimes, right? Perhaps if they were all exactly how you image them to be there wouldn’t be much point in assembling them. I don’t know. 🤷♀️
I’m waxing poetic this morning, perhaps I need more sleep – or more coffee.
Tea Time Terrors by Steve Crisp – Hua Cao Shu Mu – 300 pieces
This is a very cute image (especially if you’re a cat person), but unfortunately it was attached to a puzzle of pretty poor quality. This is another of my thrift store purchases, and I was excited to try a new brand – I’m sorry to say it wasn’t good at all.
Hua Cao Shu Mu is a new company to me, and I don’t know how long they’ve been in business. Perhaps they’re a company that popped up during the pandemic to take advantage of the run on jigsaw puzzles. The puzzles are made in China, and unfortunately the quality left a lot to be desired in my opinion. All the pieces were almost exactly the same shape and there were false fits everywhere – one of my pet peeves. The image reproduction was quite fuzzy in some places and the finish was extremely shiny. It comes with a poster that was exactly as big as the assembled puzzle – perhaps that would be good for older puzzlers with eyesight issues. The chipboard was thin, but sturdy, and had the “sharp” white backing that I am not fond of. In addition, the back was lettered from A to F, to assist in sorting and/or assembling the image.
I’ve done a puzzle before that had printing on the back to help with assembly – an image of Noah’s Ark by Eric Dowdle that was a “Jigsaw Puzzle for Dummies”. That one was more designed to help you put it together piece by piece, this puzzle seems to have the letters to assist in sorting more than actual assembly.
Wanting to get a sense of it I did sort out all the “A” pieces and then put them together. It’s fine if it helps you enjoy your puzzles, but it really isn’t for me. I put together the rest of the puzzle as I normally do without regard to the letters on the back. (It could be helpful though, especially with this brand and all the false fits that this puzzle has to offer.)
This came in a box with three separate cat/window puzzles, I think they may all be by Steve Crisp but haven’t done too much googling to be certain. There is no mention of the artist anywhere in or on the box or poster, I had to look it up myself – which makes me question whether or not this image was actually licensed to this company.
There’s been quite a bit of theft from artists in the past few years, and with the run on puzzles during the pandemic and new companies jumping into the market…well, you know what I’m saying. I have no proof that’s what went on here, but I’m skeptical about whether or not these images were actually sold to this company.
As usual when working with a new brand I was hoping for a great quality puzzle, but was quite disappointed in this one; it was nowhere near as good as I’d hoped for. At some point I’ll get to the other two puzzles in this box, but at the moment I’m just not feelin’ it. 😢
This puzzle was quite the fantastic thrift store find, and I’m amazed that a 65 year old puzzle in the original box was still complete! I had a great time assembling it even though the subject matter wasn’t the usual type of image that I like to puzzle.
You can see in the image above that most of the pieces have at least one wavy side that just sits next to adjacent pieces, that’s the Tuco cut that I have seen in the past; but this puzzle says on the box that it is 100% interlocking, so every piece also interlocks with at least one other piece as well.
The quality was excellent and I was very impressed with this puzzle. The chipboard used is described on the box as wood-like pieces made from Upson Laminated wood fibre board. In my post about this puzzle in progress I showed the thickness of the pieces against current premium puzzle brands Ravensburger and Pomegranate…
That’s a Ravensburger on the left, and Pomegranate on the right. Their pieces seem ridiculously thin compared to this Tuco puzzle, don’t they?
I also wanted to show the thickness compared to wooden puzzle brands. Starting from the left these are pieces from Liberty, Artifact, Wentworth, and the cardboard Tuco. They’re all very close to the same thickness!
I’m so glad I had the opportunity to find and assemble this amazing puzzle. It was quite a challenging assembly for only having 400+ pieces, the painterly style made it difficult at times; but I enjoyed it very very much, and will be sending it on to Penny so she can have the opportunity to try it out as well.
Vintage Halloween by Finchley Paper Arts – Bits and Pieces – 500 pieces
The pieces were sorted yesterday and I starting assembling this morning, and although I love the image it seems as though perhaps it’s going to be a little challenging. The pieces are predominantly almost triangular in shape and my brain doesn’t seem to be grasping the way everything goes together just yet. I’ve had two cups of coffee so far, you’d think the gray cells would be working by now!
The shapes are so different from what I’m used to that even with the obvious border image I missed two edge pieces on my initial sort. That almost never happens. With the way that I sort it’s usually never a problem to get all the edges the first time, and I was surprised to find that two were missing. A quick look through the trays helped me find the two stragglers before the picture was taken, but it reinforced that I’ve got to get my head around the way these pieces go together and get used to the triangular shapes.
I do realize it’s only August, but with the puzzles that have already been put together and are waiting to be posted it is actually time to start putting together Halloween images; by the time they’re up in the queue it’ll be October.
Since Halloween is my favorite holiday, I’m looking forward to going through my puzzles yet to be assembled and finding any spooky images that need to be put together. Hopefully there are more than one or two, but I’m not certain how many there could be. 🦇
I enjoyed this assembly, but was underwhelmed with the quality of the puzzle itself. The image is a wonderful collage of cards and pieces from the game and made for a fun afternoon of puzzling; but I was hoping with all the hype surrounding these board game puzzles that they’d be great quality. Perhaps managing my expectations would have been a good idea before I started.
In general, the quality was fair/good; I was hoping for better. The chipboard was quite thin, but relatively sturdy although there were still plenty of bent tabs. The image reproduction was very good, but with a shiny finish that made for a somewhat difficult time underneath the artificial lights in my puzzle room. There were a very good variety of piece shapes and the fit was somewhat loose.
I liked that it looked as though this were a picture of an actual board game, with the crease in the middle where it gets folded to fit into the box.
LOVE the doily in the corner and the pistol too. It was a fun image to put together, and not as difficult as I thought it would be; it was finished the same day I started.
If nothing else this puzzle had me watching the movie Clue again, it’s a family favorite and most of us can toss out quite a few quotes when the moment is right. Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Aileen Brennan and the entire lineup is just about as perfect a cast as you can get in my opinion. Hubby, my youngest son and I watched it together the night before I started the assembly and we all had a great time.
The images of the characters in the game just didn’t seem right to me; Miss Scarlet is supposed to look like Lesley Ann Warren, and Mr. Green should look like Michael McKean. I know the game came first, but the characters to me will always be the actors from the movie. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I told you I’ve seen it at least twenty times. (When I said the movie is a family favorite I wasn’t kidding 😊) It’s probably been at least 25 years or more since I’ve played the actual game, but I’ve seen the movie much more often – so those are the characters I think of when you say their names.
My Jigsaw Journal 