The Pet Parlour by Geoff Tristam – Ravensburger (What If #6) – 1000 pieces
Pamela runs The Pampered Pooch Parlour, but she dreams of diversifying and branching out to bigger and better things. What If her dream became reality, would things go wild? What would her shop look like then? This is what you have to puzzle in Ravensburger’s What If #6 The Pet Parlour.
If you read this blog regularly you know I love Ravensburger puzzles and that their quality is excellent. This puzzle is no different. It’s nice after working other puzzles to start a puzzle you know is going to be good and whose quality you don’t have to worry about – it’s like coming home. It makes me happy. And yes, I know, I need to get out more. 😐
This puzzle looked like fun to me, and it was even more fun than I thought it would be! I really enjoyed it very much, and of all the What If puzzles I’ve done so far (1-6) I would say this one is definitely my favorite! The concept is funny, the artwork is exceptional and it makes for a wonderful puzzle. If you’re not sure about the What If concept and you want to try it out, start with #6 – it’s tons of fun. 🙂
I can’t take the credit for this one, mom did the bulk of the assembly, I only assisted. We started it together and got about 25 percent done on a Friday when I went to visit. Then at our next Friday visit I helped her finish probably the last couple hundred pieces – mostly sky. She did most of the work during the week.
That being said, this puzzle was great fun! There were so many little jokes to find with what all those fleas were doing. Marino Degano’s cartoons are full of humor – most of the time “adult” humor – which I adore. 😇 This puzzle has lots of tongue in cheek humor and made mom and I laugh and point things out to each other while working on it. We especially liked that there was a puzzle store on the dog, and a couple of fleas were coming out of it with a Heye Dog’s Life puzzle!
I’ve got a 4000 piece Degano puzzle that I have yet to assemble full of tongue in cheek humor and lots of naughty bits – this puzzle made me want to get the big board back out and start working on that one.
I love the posters you get with the Heye triangular boxes, it makes it much easier to work on a puzzle with more than one person. It’s also fun to just sit and look at the poster before you start working to see all the funny stuff there is to see, or make a plan as to how you’re going to work the puzzle.
This puzzle had the usual Heye quality – excellent! The only drawback I find with their puzzles is the somewhat loose fit. It’s not too terrible if you’re working on a fabric covered board because the pieces do not move around accidentally unless you bump them pretty good with an arm or hand. But if you’re working on a table or other smooth surface it’s more difficult to deal with. Otherwise I love this brand. The pieces are extremely sturdy, they fit together so that you’ll know if you’ve placed a piece wrongly. I’ve never had to deal with any image lift at all, the image reproduction is gorgeous, and they have one of the best catalogs around – especially for cartoon puzzles.
I would definitely recommend this puzzle, it’s about medium difficulty as there is a bit of sky – but there are clouds and different shades to help find the correct piece. The artwork is wonderfully cute and funny and a little bit naughty which makes for a great puzzle in my book!
Well look what I found wandering the web looking at jigsaw puzzles! This new puzzle is manufactured by a French company – Grafika, will be available in September of 2017, and will be 48,000 pieces!! 😮 I was sure Educa would be the next world’s largest! It seems I’m rarely right about anything these days. If my math is correct the price of this bad boy is 510 US dollars (395.99 British Pounds) Oh my.
The new puzzle is called Travel Around the World, and represents countries on every continent. The completed puzzle will measure 26.77 x 6.30 feet (8.16 x 1.92 meters). Apparently the puzzle will be delivered in a wooden box with wheels to haul the 55 pounds (25kg) of puzzle pieces! There are 24 separate bags of 2000 pieces each. It also comes with 2 posters of the puzzle image, and a poster showing a map of the world with the locations of the individual puzzle images.
The purists will say it’s not really a 48,000 piece puzzle unless you mix all the bags. I’m sure the purists are lovely people, but they should also try not to stomp on the feelings of others who might enjoy doing large piece puzzles in sections. Just my opinion. I say, if it makes you happy to mix the bags, go for it. I also say, if you want to do the puzzle in sections and still say you’ve completed the puzzle, go for it, and way to go! When my 40,320 piece puzzle is all laid out and connected I would like for someone to try and say something snarky about how I didn’t REALLY put together a 40,320 piece puzzle. I walk with a cane. It’s sturdy, and metal. Just saying. 😇
I’ve never heard of or tried Grafika, and haven’t seen any reviews of their puzzles either. Makes me want to get at least one of their puzzles to try it out and see what I think of the brand. Has anyone else tried this brand? I’d love to hear from you if you have.
I gotta admit, I’m super tempted! I still have 2 weeks to go before we assemble the current World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle and I know once I see it all laid out like that it’s gonna make me want to do the next one too! I should just cool my heels, find a Grafika puzzle and try it out and see how I feel about it, right?
I like the look of this one too! Help! I think I may have a problem. I still have no idea what’s going to happen to the Disney puzzle. *sigh*
Meet The Imaginaries by Philip Straub – Endless Games – 1000 pieces
I absolutely love this artwork! Mom found this one at the thrift store, and I couldn’t wait to get started on it. I love the artwork by Philip Straub, it grabbed me as soon as I saw it. A new company too, so I was extra excited to get started!
I wish I had good news to report about the quality, but I was underwhelmed by it. I was hoping for at least a fair quality puzzle because there are a couple other puzzles by the same artist that I would love to do. But unfortunately – not so much. There was quite a bit of image lift on the pieces, and also the image was actually scraping off in places. The pieces were thick enough, but they way they fit together was odd. The best way I can describe it was “spongy”. It was not always obvious when you got a piece connected wrong, and how they fit together was kind of soft and spongy. Sometimes it felt like the piece was where it was supposed to be when it wasn’t in the right place.
You can see that the bottom half of the puzzle is quite dark, and boy oh boy did it get difficult once the brighter parts were done! I actually had a great time assembling the top part of the puzzle in spite of the quality; but once all the brighter bits were finished the dark stuff took a while and I really had to concentrate. I still enjoyed the puzzle overall but the quality left a lot to be desired.
The title of this puzzle is Meet The Imaginaries, can you see them hiding in there? There are quite a few of them, and they look pretty shy – poor things! Interesting note, the name of the puzzle was nowhere on the box! The back of the box had a picture and small blurb about the artist, but nowhere did it tell me the name of the puzzle I was doing. It told me the name of the series of puzzles he’d done, but not the puzzle inside that box. I had to look it up online.
I enjoyed this puzzle, but wish the quality had been better. Still, I can’t really complain about a thrift store puzzle – what a blessing it is to be able to buy most of our puzzles that way! I really do appreciate everyone who donates puzzles, and most of the ones we buy we donate back once we’ve done them. Every now and then we find an amazing puzzle that was fun to do and we keep those. 🙂
Noah’s Ark by Eric Dowdle – TDC Games (Jigsaw Puzzles for Dummies) – 1000 pieces
It was purely coincidence that right after I finished Noah’s Ark by Jean-Jacques Loup that mom found this Noah’s Ark by Eric Dowdle at the thrift store. Maybe someone is trying to tell me something – I hope it means rain is coming because we’re having a bit of a drought down here!
Interesting concept for this puzzle, the box looks like the “For Dummies” books and each pieces is alphanumerically numbered on the back. There is also a small instruction booklet that comes in the box to explain the steps of how to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, along with a map on the back to show you where each piece should go.
There are plenty of ways for those people who haven’t done jigsaw puzzles before to get the instruction and help they need to complete a 1000 piece puzzle. Or, if you are already a puzzler you can disregard the map and the numbers and just assemble it as you would any other puzzle – the choice is yours! Like it says on the box “you decide the level of difficulty”.
The quality of this puzzle was very good. The pieces were thick and sturdy and fit together well; the image reproduction was very nice and there was no image lift on any of the pieces. Very good all around quality!
Eric Dowdle’s artwork is compelling to me. There’s something about the symmetry of his pieces and the clean lines – I can’t put my finger on exactly why I like it so much but I like it very much. 😍 It does make for a more difficult puzzle sometimes but there’s fun in the extra challenge. At least I think so. There’s a bit of humor in this puzzle too, you’ll find a pair of unicorns boycotting the ark with placards that say “heck no we won’t go”, a traffic cop for the large animals, and even a polar bear with sunglasses and a beverage!
I did attempt to assemble the puzzle the “dummies” way, first by only using the numbers to do all of a few rows, and then by using the numbers to pull all the pieces for one row but then flipping the pieces over and putting the row together without the numbers. For me it takes the sense of accomplishment away – I just read letters and numbers and put them in order. There’s no fun in that for me, but I wanted to try it that way to get a sense of the brand. If it helps you and you learn to do jigsaws that way I’m all for it; assemble it whichever way makes you happy!
If you find a for dummies puzzle that you like, don’t be put off by the dummies part; the quality is very good – I say go for it. 🙂
