#Fuzzy Friends by Keith Kimberlin – MasterPieces – 500 pieces
How adorable are these guys and gals? So sweet! This was a great quality puzzle by MasterPieces. The random cut was lovely, but it took me a minute or two to wrap my aging brain around the way things would go together. There’s always a period of adjustment when I start a randomly cut puzzle, I have to stare at things for a while until the gray cells warm up and comprehend how the pieces fit together. Once that’s done it’s off to the races!
This is how it looked after putting together everything I pulled from the initial sorting – not bad!
This was my favorite section, I love those faces! Puppies and kittens are almost always cute and make for adorable puzzles. They’re not always easy (a lot of fur tends to be a bit of a challenge) but they’re usually entertaining.
The fit was very good and I truly enjoyed the random cut. It’s been a little while since I’ve assembled a MasterPieces puzzle, I forgot how much fun they can be. After a steady diet of grid cut puzzles, it’s lovely to change things up and do something different.
Whether you prefer random or grid cut, there’s no denying they are very cute fuzzy friends. 🐶🐱
Who Said That? by Colin Bodie – Crystal Lines – 504 pieces
What a fascinating and fun jigsaw puzzle! It was almost as much fun sorting this one as it was assembling it. I loved reading all the quotes – many I knew, and many I’d never heard before. If you can find one of these puzzles I would highly recommend giving it a try; it’s not easy, but the challenge is oh so much fun.
In my previous in progress post regarding this puzzle I mistakenly said that this was a Buffalo puzzle, in fact it’s by Crystal Lines. It was made in Australia, a great product sent to us from Down Under. This particular puzzle is 25 years old, produced in 1994. I highly doubt it’s still being manufactured, but you might be able to find it in your local thrift store if you’re very lucky.
There were 240 portraits and 240 quotes to match up. Every portrait piece fits with every quote piece, you have to be careful. The portraits all overlapped with the pieces above or below them (or both), and they were helpful in making sure you matched them up properly. You don’t need to know them all to assemble this puzzle, but knowing some of them helps to get you started. There were quite a few quotes from movies that were easy to match up with the actors who said them: “Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn” can only be one person, find the portrait of Clark Gable and you’re on your way.
There were philosophers, artists, entertainers, businessmen and women, writers, poets, and public figures just to name a few. From Socrates to Robin Williams the quotes were thought provoking, funny, a little shocking, and hilarious. Reading through them all was so entertaining! 😎
I knew more than I thought I would, and there also were a few that I thought I knew for sure and was completely wrong. Oh well, I don’t usually get a perfect score on anything.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes – mostly silly and very true….
The quality of this puzzle was stellar, and the pieces were quite large. At 504 pieces this puzzle measured approximately 38 x 24 inches, about the size of the average 2000 piece puzzle! The pieces are very thick and fit together quite tightly. The portraits were very well done and I could tell who most of them were without reading the names (the ones I was familiar with, anyway).
If you are lucky enough to come across this puzzle, I suggest you give it a try. It isn’t easy, but boy howdy is it fun! 🙂
Trick or Treat 2 by Sheila Lee – Sunsout – 500 pieces
I found this puzzle at mom’s, it’s a thrift store find and I really like the image! The box was pretty beat up, and I was worried that it would be missing pieces, but luckily they were all present and accounted for. I love how colorful it is, and it was a lot more fun to assemble than I expected.
The random cut was pretty fun to work with, but the fit was mushy. You could put two pieces together and they felt and looked as though they fit, but they absolutely did not. With this kind of fit you can’t rely on feel, you have to pay close attention and sometimes I even had to turn the pieces over to be certain. That’s what I call a mushy fit, and I am most definitely NOT a fan.
Mushy fit aside though, it was still pretty entertaining for my first holiday puzzle of the month.
Little Feminist by Lydia Ortiz – Mudpuppy – 500 pieces
This colorful puzzle was completely entertaining and quick to go together. Only one piece shape, but the little sections were relatively easy to pick out and assemble even without a variety in the piece shape.
I love the catalog of Mudpuppy puzzles, but they’re another brand that only has the one piece shape. Perhaps I’m getting to be a crochety old lady who complains too much, but I’m a bit annoyed by how many brands have just the one piece shape. I’ve assembled a few of their puzzles before, so at least I knew going in that they would all be the same shape.
This is my kind of image though; I love a collage and I love cartoon puzzles too. It went together very quickly because it was hard to walk away. Each section lead to the next, and they were all fun to assemble.
This is another puzzle that my daughter found for me in the clearance section at Barnes & Noble when we were trying to find a particular book. I can never go into a store without checking to see if there are any puzzles for me to look through. It’s a sickness, one I believe I discovered – PADS. I’m severely afflicted and loving it! 💖
This puzzle was an interesting test for me, I assembled it much differently than I usually do. I found it enjoyable and pretty entertaining! It’s a very nice quality puzzle, and the repetition of the image made it a bit of a challenge. I had a very good time with this one. 🙂
With all the different elements repeated several times, I picked certain things (like pincushions, the red buttons, or the spools of thread) and assembled them all. Then I used the box image to see where each one fit into the frame.
I found that I really enjoyed assembling the puzzle this way. And once I got a few parts assembled and set in the frame, it was easier to see where things belonged and work off of them. It’s not always going to be applicable to every puzzle image, but it was a nice change for me.
Maybe we should all shake things up every now and again and try things a different way – we might find that we like it very much!
I’m enjoying these Big Ben puzzles, the quality is quite good and they have plenty of interesting and challenging images to choose from. They’re nice when I need a quick puzzle fix, and I like having them around. When I finish a larger puzzle and want something that will be entertaining and won’t take forever to complete I’ve got a Big Ben puzzle that’ll do the trick very nicely.
My Jigsaw Journal 