Beauty Salon

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Wasgij #11 Beauty Salon by Graham Thompson – Jumbo – 1000 pieces

Another puzzle I won’t show the whole picture of, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t done the puzzle yet, or might want to buy it. It’s more fun to figure it out yourself!

I absolutely love the quality of Jumbo puzzles, the waxy feel of the pieces, the matte finish, the way the pieces fit together, everything!! They’re one of the best there is, in my opinion. I still have a stack of Wasgij puzzles in my closet, about 5 feet high that still need to be assembled. I’ll get back to my regular puzzles when I’m done with the giant Disney puzzle I’m working on, and the Wasgij’s will most likely be the first ones I’m heading for.

The Beauty Salon was a fun puzzle to assemble, I love the artwork and humor of Graham Thompson. His puzzles always have so much detail in them, and there is always something funny in the background as well as the foreground. This was just a great puzzle overall – great artwork, great quality, great fun!!

 

Cookbooks

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Cookbooks by Charlie Girard – White Mountain Puzzles – 1000 pieces

This puzzle was sooooo much fun for me! Lots of words to assemble – love it! A collage – too fun! Cookbooks – I love a good cookbook! (I know I’m weird, but I’m adorable and amusing so it’s ok) 🙂

My daughter got this for my mom. She loves cookbooks even more than I do, I would say she probably has a couple hundred of them at least. 😮 She even has a couple of the cookbooks in the puzzle, and so do I! She loved it, and I assembled it when she was done.

It’s one of the puzzles that I would definitely do over again. I enjoyed looking at the names of the cookbooks and the pictures on the covers were cute, funny, beautiful and sometimes very odd. I love that stuff! This is a great puzzle that I definitely recommend.

United Plates of America

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United Plates of America by Alan Holcombe – Bits and Pieces – 1000 pieces

This was a really fun puzzle for me. It was a thrift store purchase and well worth the 99 cents!

It’s by Bits and Pieces which seems like hit or miss quality to me. I’ve had great puzzles from them and really bad puzzles. So I guess I put them in the thrift store only category along with Sunsout; I have to be able to see and feel the pieces before I will purchase them. This puzzle I had no problem with the quality at all. You can see the pieces fit together well, the piece shape isn’t glaringly obvious in the finished puzzle and the image quality is very good.

Even with all the blue and the stripes of the flag it was only about medium difficulty, and wasn’t tedious for me at all. It was fun to assemble and I would definitely recommend it!

Can You See What I See?

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Can You See What I See (I Spy) – Ceaco – 1000 pieces

Although I didn’t care much for the quality of this puzzle, the image was quite a challenge. An I Spy puzzle with randomness everywhere!

For some insane reason I decided that I was going to assemble this puzzle without the aid of looking at the picture on the box.  I have no idea why I did that, but I did!  Hubby helped me a lot with this puzzle and it took us 4 or 5 nights to get it done. It would have been much easier and taken much less time if I had used the box for reference, but I was stubborn and wanted to do it all with no help.

It took much longer than normal for a 1000 piece puzzle, but the extra challenge of having no reference made it feel like a real accomplishment when it was finished.

Give yourself a challenge every once in a while, it’s fun and you have no idea how proud you’ll be once you’ve accomplished it!

Celebration of Women – Tea Time

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Celebration of Women – Tea Time by Patricia Govezensky – Sure-Lox – 500 pieces

My first Sure-Lox puzzle…..eh. Didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it either. The pieces were thin, not the thinnest I’ve worked with but thin. My main problem with this puzzle was that every piece was the same shape. There were slight variations, but every piece had two prongs and two holes. Boring. Momma needs more excitement in her life! More piece shapes please! 😉

On the plus side, the pieces fit together very well, well enough that you can lift the puzzle by one of the corners and it basically stayed together. I like when a puzzle fits together well, but not so tightly that you have to work on your biceps to put the pieces together. (I mean, I know I’m a woman in her 40’s and I have bingo wings, but I’m doing the best I can! Don’t make me work out doing a jigsaw puzzle!) And you can see that the piece shapes are not glaringly obvious in the finished puzzle, especially the darker sections. The image quality was quite good as well. It took me a while to get used to the artwork in this one, but I ended up loving the artwork and I think the finished puzzle is interesting and beautiful.

I can’t say whether or not I would buy another puzzle from this company. On the one hand the pieces are thin and there is only one piece shape, on the other hand the fit is excellent and the image quality is very good. I guess it would come down to how I felt about the image itself, maybe……maybe not.