Doughnuts

On February 8, 2020 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw PuzzlesLeave a comment

It was so nice to open this puzzle and see the fantastic quality of the pieces and feel the linen finish – it was wonderful to get back to a Cobble Hill puzzle, they’re excellent quality puzzles and it was lovely even to sort these pieces!

I got several gift cards this past Christmas, and one of them was for Barnes & Noble; I made sure to use it up in January when their puzzles are buy one get one 50% off – I made the most of my gift! I got plenty of puzzles to keep me entertained and happy for quite a while, and this is the first one that I’ve put together.

I don’t know why it’s been so long since I’ve assembled a Cobble Hill, they’re such nice quality. Part of it is that I’ve been mostly working puzzles from mom’s house, and partly because when I do venture out of the house in search of puzzles Tuesday Morning is where I normally go because it’s so close to my house. Unfortunately they don’t usually carry Cobble Hill. After putting this puzzle together though, I may have to suck it up and drive a little farther now and then, I loved working with these pieces!

Doughnut puzzle images are always fun for me, you can do like I did and separate out all of one color – like blue, or you can assemble it one doughnut at a time. Whichever way works for you is absolutely correct. I started with blue, green, and pink, and then the rest it of was mostly filling in. It wasn’t too easy or too difficult, this one was a total Goldilocks assembly – it was just right.

If you’re looking for a great quality doughnut puzzle, I can definitely recommend this one; big pieces, thick chipboard, linen finish, excellent fit – it’s got it all. 🍩👍

I love a food puzzle, and oddly they almost never make me hungry. Do any of you ever get hungry working with a food puzzle?

Good Housekeeping Collection

On February 6, 2020February 6, 2020 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles4 Comments

GH Collection — 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.

GH Collection 1

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.

GH Collection 2

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

On February 5, 2020 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles4 Comments

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.

Review: The Prague Clock

On February 3, 2020 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Puzzle reviews6 Comments

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 experiment three 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

Pixar Posters

On February 2, 2020February 1, 2020 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles7 Comments

I know, it’s a Ceaco, what in the world am I doing assembling a Ceaco so soon after the Christmas debacle? It was a gift, and I love the image, so why not? I can’t very well have a bonfire and torch all the Ceaco puzzles I have here…..although…….🤔.

The fit was terrible, it was very loose and even moving three connected pieces was pretty hard to do. On the plus side the pieces were a workable thickness and the image reproduction was very good. Again, this is one of those times where the image overcame the quality and I enjoyed myself anyway. It’s a collage, there are lots of words, and each of the posters is bright and fun. I had a great time with it, despite it’s issues.

*I tried to be impartial and just judge the puzzle on it’s own merits, and I think I was, but I’m still a little perturbed at the brand in general and so I may have been specifically on the lookout for any problems.*

These were my two favorite sections to assemble, though pretty much all of them were fun. I loved the movie Brave – Girls rule! – and it was the first section I put together; all that red hair was the most logical place to start after putting together all the words and titles. Coco was much more entertaining to assemble than I thought, and although I haven’t seen the movie I found myself enjoying it very much. My son tells me I should see it and that it was an excellent movie that I will love; he and I have VERY different tastes in movies, so I’m not so sure about his recommendation. 😉

My kids are older now and so I haven’t seen many of the newer Disney-Pixar movies. Of all the movies shown here I have seen just over half of them, nine out of seventeen. There was a time not so long ago that when a new movie came out on DVD (or VHS) that we would all take a trip to the store and get ourselves a copy; then we’d go home and watch it together that evening – or sometimes we couldn’t wait and we watched it in the afternoon. I have great memories of watching Disney movies with my kids, and so perhaps I haven’t watched the newer ones because my kids are all adults, off living their own lives, and not always available to watch movies with mom.

Pixar Posters 3

This is the last section I put together, only because everything is blue, and most of the pieces just looked blue – even the teeth! It was still good fun though, especially because at the end of the puzzle when the pieces are dwindling down to nothing it gets more and more exciting. You’re almost there, and every piece you find gets you that much closer to the end, and you’re finding each one faster and faster – almost more quickly than you can put them into the puzzle!

As many puzzles as I’ve done, the end is still as exciting to me as it ever was. Getting down to the last few pieces is entertaining, full of anticipation, fast-moving, thrilling, dramatic, and always fun. I hope it never gets old.