I just started sorting this puzzle, but I am SO looking forward to working on it! My regular readers know how collages are my happy place; and for myself, a voracious reader as a child, assembling these book covers is going to be highly entertaining.
The first piece I saw, once the pieces were dumped out of the bag, was a part of the title from the book Charlotte’s Web. It was a favorite of mine as a child, and I’m not sure I could tell you how many times I actually read it. Re-reading my favorites was something I did often, and happily.
Assembling the covers of my favorite books from childhood is going to be so much fun!
This puzzle is just beautiful, and other than the faces the entire image reminded me of the movie I remember as a child, and the movie I remember watching with my children. I love the look of the image as a whole, and the puzzle itself was wonderful quality and a joy to assemble.
Excellent Ravensburger quality, I think this one has to be the best quality from this brand that I’ve assembled in a while. These Disney puzzles are “collectors editions”, and more expensive than the average Ravensburger puzzle. Normally I don’t purchase these, because it annoys me a little bit that they cost more money, but this was a “pandemic purchase” that I made simply because it was available. Beautiful, matte finish, wonderful fit, excellent image reproduction – the usual premium quality I expect from this brand. It’s truly lovely to work with, and has a great hand feel.
The rest of this post is me complaining about something, but don’t take it to mean that I didn’t enjoy this puzzle. I absolutely enjoyed this puzzle, it was a great image with fantastic quality and I enjoyed working with it very, very much.
These are the creatures of the forest I remember from the movies when I was little, this is what they look like in my brain, if that makes sense.
As a crotchety old lady, I feel it’s my place to complain about the way they do things now and the way they used to be done. This is NOT the face of Aurora that I remember, why is it changed? Why is Charming’s face different? Things don’t always need to be updated. It seems like a slap in the face to the artists who made this movie – painstakingly, cell by cell. It’s annoying. I’m annoyed.
Do all Disney princesses have to be updated so that they’re stunningly beautiful with plump, kissable lips and the figure of a small undernourished boy? Has anyone told the muckey-mucks at Disney that women eat food? That we’re all shapes and sizes, some of us cut out hair short, and plenty of us don’t need a man to make our lives complete? Just wondering. I’m cranky. This stuff makes me cranky.
I had a really good time with this one – as is usual for almost all collages – and insomnia helped to make sure that it was assembled in less than 24 hours. It certainly helps me get more puzzling done, but I’m not sure it’s great for my health. 😐
The piece quality was very good on this puzzle; thickness, shapes, and fit were all quite nice. The image reproduction though, wasn’t the best. There was quite a bit of fuzziness on many of the cereal boxes. It seems to be a recurring problem with White Mountain collage puzzles, but I still buy them because they make me happy to assemble them, fuzzy spots or no.
What in the world is this cereal doing in a collage of fun cereals? This is your parent’s and grandparent’s cereal! If I had to eat this there would be so much fruit and sugar on it that it would be obscene. Yikes.
Kix was the only cereal shown with 3 separate boxes. This was my favorite of the three, but it definitely isn’t my favorite of the cereals. I remember being younger and mom buying this cereal and we were not happy about it. To me it was so boring and tasteless, it was like chewing on little round puffs of styrofoam. Blech! When my kids were younger and we were on assistance, I remember that this was one of the few cereals you were allowed to buy for them. They had to be relatively healthy with as little sugar as possible, and I always opted to buy the Chex cereals for the kids instead, they were much better tasting if you ask me.
This is one of my favorites, probably tied with Lucky Charms in the number two spot. Graham Cracker cereal – yum! (My favorite isn’t a General Mills cereal, so it’s nowhere to be found in this puzzle).
All in all I adored this puzzle, not only was it fun to assemble it brought back great childhood memories for me. 🥣💗
Banana Split by Aimee Stewart – Buffalo – 1000 pieces
Ah, a puzzle from a good brand with an image by Aimee Stewart. My happy place. Beautiful, fun, not too easy – the perfect combination for puzzlers both new and seasoned. 💜
Because there are so many different items, colors, textures, and elements you don’t have to focus on the image as a whole when you begin assembling. When you’re turning pieces over, or sorting, or whatever you do when you start a puzzle you will see things that stand out to you. A tablespoon of sprinkles, the striped containers, waffle cones, words, etc.; and you can start small with whatever small image or section you choose. You don’t have to worry about dealing with it all at once like you do when you’re assembling a landscape where 1/3 of the image is the sky or water, etc.
This was the first thing I assembled, even before the words. I usually go for all the words first, but these pieces were so easy to pick out, and I was just inspired to start with them. It wasn’t as easy to assemble as it was to sort, but the strawberries certainly were fun! (And I missed a few of the green pieces which made it a little more of a challenge.)
The banana split in the middle of the image was the absolute hardest part for me, and pretty much the very last thing I assembled. With those bright colors you’d think it would have been much easier, but it definitely wasn’t – at least for me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it though, I enjoyed it very much!
These cute little guys were so difficult to find and put together, almost all the pieces looked as if they belonged somewhere else – either that or I’m slipping a bit. No matter, I absolutely love the vintage look of them, they are so adorable!
I think I’m down to only one more Aimee Stewart puzzle here at home 😱 but it seems as though many of the puzzle manufacturers and retailers have been getting back to work and restocking, so perhaps I’ll be able to get myself a few more soon. I certainly hope so, only one more of her puzzles here to assemble just won’t do!
The Valuation Day by Geoff Tristam – Ravensburger (What If? Puzzles) – 1000 pieces
Such a fun puzzle! As per my usual rules I do not show the picture of the entire finished puzzle, to do so would be a spoiler and I’m not about spoiling anything. When I started my first What If? puzzle, I searched for a picture of the box to put on my “What’s on my board” section of the homepage and of course the first image that popped up was of the finished puzzle – what a disappointment for me! I couldn’t un-see it, I knew what happened in the image and I was upset. I will never do that to my readers, so all you get to see is the character shown on the box, heavily cropped.
You have to use more brain cells than normal because you don’t have the finished picture; but luckily with this series there are plenty of hints on the box image. You can see what everyone is wearing, what the background looks like, and you know what the premise is. This puzzle in particular was a little easier because you can tell as soon as you start turning over pieces and sorting what is going to happen. I can’t tell you what, but the “problem” is evident all over the pieces.
According to what we’re told, “The picture on the box shows the crowd’s excitement and anticipation….the puzzle inside this box depicts the shattering outcome! Doris Bootsayle loves rooting around jumble sales, charity shops and the like. She cannot wait to get TV auction expert Tom Wannapott to value her latest find. Will Tom make her dreams come true, or is there a sting in this tantalizing tale?”
So what happens? Of course I can’t tell you! That would ruin the fun out of figuring it out yourself. I love these puzzles where you don’t have an image and you have to figure out where everyone ends up and what happened. The artwork is fantastic, the puzzle quality is excellent, and the fun is built right in.
I’ve never shown this before, but one of the fun things about these puzzles is that they’re all drawn by the same artist, Geoff Tristam (one of my favorites 💖), and he does something fun on the back of the box. There’s a picture of him next to his bio, and in every picture he’s dressed up in the theme of the image. In this puzzle, which is a tv show much like Antiques Road Show, he’s dressed up as the expert…
Geoff Tristam
The Expert
I’ll try to remember to show his picture on the box with the remaining What If? puzzles I have left to do. They make me smile, and a smile can be such a help when you’re having a bad day, or just help to brighten a good day even more.
Have you done a Ravensburger What If? Puzzle? If not, I highly recommend giving one a try. I love them! 💟
