I started a new puzzle this morning – a collage of album covers! This is the first album I put together, and I can already tell it’s going to be a very entertaining assembly. 😉
There’s a lot of dark and indistinct areas, but because it’s a Springbok puzzle with a random cut it might be a little easier than normal to find the pieces I need. It’s a big one, 24 x 30 inches, but having so many small sections to assemble makes it seem much less daunting.
What are you working on this weekend?
Mom and I have finally gotten back to work on the Mystery Puzzle! And although we found and assembled quite a few pieces in the last few days there’s one piece in particular that made us both VERY happy – we found the one we needed to complete the top edge of the puzzle!!
We only needed one, thin, tiny little piece to complete the top edge. Yay! I can report that the this edge measures almost 30 inches across, but we still have no idea how tall it’s going to be. Since it’s obviously a building, and the color line cutting makes for many straight edges that go on the inside of the puzzle, we aren’t really even attempting to assemble the edges.
We’re finding (or trying to find) significantly interestingly shaped pieces and working outwards. Although you can see from the pictures that many of them are significantly interesting, so it isn’t as easy as we’d hoped. 😉
Most of the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of days is in small chunks of pieces that are on trays and scattered all over the board. I didn’t take pictures of them because I was too excited about sharing the progress of finding that one teeny piece. Still, every piece we find that connects to something is a triumph; and we’re continuing to revel in the fun of the mystery, the crazy wonderful pieces, and the time spent together. 💗😍💗
Here at My Jigsaw Journal I’m sure you can guess which type of puzzles we love the most, but today isn’t just for jigsaw puzzles, it’s puzzles of all kinds – crosswords, logic, brain teasers, anagrams, word searches, etc. If you like to “puzzle” you are definitely welcome here, but the focus is definitely on jigsaws. 😉
I’ve done puzzles since I was very young, mostly at my grandmother’s side. She always seemed to have a jigsaw puzzle in progress at her house, and she was never impatient with my sisters and me picking up pieces and trying them in every single empty spot (regardless of color or shape). She had the patience of a saint sometimes! This is a photo I shared on this day back in 2017 of the two of us at her house sometime in the mid-1970’s.
This is my favorite picture of us, although it’s been around 45 years or so since I was that cute!
Nowadays I mostly puzzle alone; but sometimes I’m fortunate enough to get to assemble jigsaws with one or more members of my small “puzzle posse” – Mom, hubby, daughter, and my oldest son. Many times the solitude of puzzling by myself is exactly what I need, but I also enjoy being able to spend time with loved ones around the puzzle board. Being together, working towards a common goal, laughing, teasing, celebrating the small victory of a found piece or connecting two sections – these are worth more to me than any “thing” could ever be. For me, jigsaw puzzles are a family thing. 🙂
I love jigsaw puzzles of all kinds, and I love the calm that puzzling seems to bring me. I started this blog for a giant puzzle project, but have kept it going because I enjoy assembling, talking, and writing about jigsaw puzzles of every shape and size. If you’re new here feel free to stick around and check out the puzzles I’ve put together over the past few years. If you’re a regular reader, thanks for hanging out and talking puzzles with me. I appreciate every single one of you!
Thank to my regular readers for sharing your P.A.D.S. diagnoses too, it helps to know we are not alone. Tell your puzzle friends about this syndrome so they too can be a part of the PADS Posse, and this community of fellow sufferers. We are all here for each other!😂😂
I hope you find time today to turn off those electronic screens and spend some time with whatever kind of puzzle makes you happy. This may surprise you, but I think I’ll spend part of today assembling a jigsaw puzzle or two. Shocking! 😱
Enjoy National Puzzle Day my friends!
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!
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.
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!
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. ☺
My Jigsaw Journal 