Common Quilt Blocks

Quilt Blocks
Common Quilt Blocks – Cobble Hill – 1000 pieces

I ADORED this puzzle – it was so much fun! Cobble Hill quality is excellent, and I enjoyed the random cut of the pieces and the beautiful colors. The fabrics were so interesting too, a lot of them would make ugly clothes but they do make lovely quilt blocks. 😉

Cobble Hill has such a great catalog of puzzle images, after assembling this one the PADS is flaring up and I want to get a whole bunch more of their puzzles. I love the feel of the pieces and the way they fit together – just a great quality puzzle all around. Someone needs to take my credit cards for a day or two, I’m feeling the need for some new puzzles!

Quilt Blocks 1

Great name to go with a great fabric pattern. I loved that all the quilt block patterns have names, and I found that it helped quite a bit with the assembly.

And of course I loved these two patterns because they had the word puzzle in their names! Old Maid’s Puzzle and Dutchman’s Puzzle, obviously they are my favorites. 😁

And now I have this burning desire to find and assemble every single quilt block puzzle there is – and I know there are quite a few. I enjoyed this one so much that it leaves me wanting more. Quilts and quilt blocks make for highly entertaining puzzles, at least they do for me. Perhaps it’s the neat, orderly rows and the fact that they’re put in some kind of order; it may be soothing for my OCD.

Whatever the reason, I’d love to get my hands on some more quilt block puzzles. I highly recommend you give this one a try, it was too much fun! 💝

Vintage Tin Toys

Vintage Tin Toys
Vintage Tin Toys by Lewis T. Johnson – Milton Bradley – 1000 pieces

My beautiful daughter bought me this puzzle for no reason other than she saw it at the store and thought I would love it. She was right – and sweeter than sugar!

It was a pretty challenging assembly, but I absolutely adored it. Such bright colors and interesting toys, not to mention an excellent quality puzzle. The fit was a bit loose, but otherwise the pieces were thick with varied shapes, and the image reproduction was beautiful! I haven’t done many 1000 piece Milton Bradley puzzles, but I was happily surprised at the quality of this one. If we find more amazing images like this one, I hope to be doing more of them very soon!

Vintage Tin Toys 1
Umm…..a bartender?

Wow, they certainly didn’t mind unconventional toys back in the day, huh? A bartender toy for a child? This actually made me laugh out loud! I wonder what the mechanism made the little tin bartender do? A toy that pours and serves little drinks? Wow. Just, wow.

Vintage Tin Toys 2

This is silly, a tin chicken – but I suppose who am I to judge right? I didn’t even realize this was in the puzzle because the stupid people who designed the puzzle box decided to put a banner over this portion of it. When I realized what the pieces were and set them aside, I couldn’t wait to see what it looked like all put together. A silly chicken!

Vintage Tin Toys 3

Ventriloquist dummies must have been all the rage, I love how fun and silly these toys are! Perhaps a young boy or girl wouldn’t care what it said on the side of it, they would most likely be happy with any toy car. Still, this one gave me a chuckle.

Sometimes it amazes me that a box full of hundreds of pieces of cut up cardboard or wood pictures could bring me so much joy – but they absolutely do. But it isn’t only joy – serenity, smiles, laughs, concentration, fixation, obsession, happiness, sadness, exhilaration, peace, victory, pride, and too many more to name. Puzzles are a gift to ourselves and our minds, and I, for one, intend to keep on giving. 🧩💖

The 1970’s

The 1970's
The 1970’s – Re-marks – 1500 pieces

I can’t even express how much I loved putting this one together, it was a trip down memory lane and I loved every memory and every piece that clicked together. To be honest the fit wasn’t great, but for this puzzle it was all about the image. Almost every small section brought back memories and I had the best time!

Get ready for a long post rambling on and on about the days of yesteryear and my memories of these things in the 1970’s. This puzzle is a fantastic image, and for those of us that grew up in the 70’s and 80’s this collage will bring a smile to your face. 🙂

The 1970's 1

Now if you’re a young’n, this will blow your mind; the way we used to get music much of the time was compilation albums like this one. If you couldn’t afford to buy all the albums this was a much cheaper way to get all the music you loved. No downloading songs or smartphones anywhere in sight. Times were tough! There was another way too, if you had lots of time to sit and listen to the radio with your boombox you could hit record when a favorite song came on and make yourself a mix tape! I used to do that especially around New Year’s when the stations would play the top 100 or so songs of the year. The trick was to wait until the DJ stopped talking. 😉

The 1970's 2

My parents loved Laugh-In, and watched it every week. I definitely didn’t understand all the jokes, but for a child it was perfect; lots of colors and camera movements, and skits that were very quick for our short attention spans. I loved it too, but at the time I didn’t know all the reasons why. Ruth Buzzi’s character Gladys was a favorite, as was Arte Johnson’s Tyrone. Great show!

The 1970's 3

I’m sure many readers will recognize some or all of these songs, but I am old enough to remember when they were playing on the radio – not as classics, but as new music! I used to have 45’s of My Sharona, Y.M.C.A, and I Will Survive. If only I still had them they might be worth a lot of cash! (45’s were small vinyl records with only one song [per side] that you played on a turntable)

The 1970's 4

I don’t have much recollection of Richard Scarry’s books when I was a child, but my children LOVED them when they were young. I read them to my kids a lot, and my youngest even had a rug in his room with a map of Busytown on it, he adored playing with it and lining up his cars along the streets.

The 1970's 5

This is the one of the smallest sections of the puzzle, but it holds the most memories for me. My sisters and I had this album (and 8 track), watched the television special, and knew every word and every song by heart. If you’re not familiar, it was created by Marlo Thomas and released in 1972; it promoted gender neutrality, basically saying that boys and girls could be anything they wanted regardless of their gender and achieve amazing things. It had an all star cast; Rosey Grier (former pro football player), Michael Jackson, Roberta Flack, Harry Belafonte, Mel Brooks, Dustin Hoffman, Kris Kristofferson, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Alan Alda, Dionne Warwick, and many more. It was a fantastic album for kids and I can still remember all the songs and scenes more than 45 years later. 🤍

I could write a little blurb about almost every section in this puzzle, but I had to stop somewhere. The Carol Burnett Show was one of my favorites – I loved all things comedy as a child (and still do). Sesame Street was another favorite when I was very young – in fact I’m older than Sesame Street. Oh my! Today’s post was brought to you by The Letter “O”. O is for OLD LADY. 👵

I loved this puzzle more for the memories than anything else, but that doesn’t mean the assembly was bad. In fact it was quite the opposite. Even with the loose fit it was great fun with a great image, and brought back great memories!

Movie Lovers

Movie Lovers
Movie Lovers – Re-marks – 500 pieces

This was a great puzzle that went together extremely quickly; I love old posters of pretty much anything – advertisements, artwork, travel, movies, etc. It seems as though they put much more thought and effort into them back in the day as compared to now. (Or it could just be my age showing, “Back in my day……” 👵)

There were lots of titles and other words to put together, which I adore. But with an image like this I don’t start with all the words, I separate them by entire sections. If I pulled out all the pieces with words on them it would be 90% of the entire puzzle!

I’ve only seen 9 of the 32 movies shown here, I guess that means I’m not much of a cinephile. Oh well. I know it’s hard to read some of the titles because the piece shape is very obvious but of the ones you can read, how many of these movies have you seen?

Movie Lovers 1

You can’t really tell until you see them close up how good the image reproduction is – if your eyes were good enough you could read every word!

Movie Lovers 3

You can see from this picture that the fit wasn’t great; the pieces didn’t fit properly unless you really smushed them into place. I glued this puzzle for my son to hang in his room, and it looks a little better now that it’s been filled in a bit and the pieces are secured into place.

Movie Lovers 2

I’ve never even heard of this film before, but after doing a little research I find that it’s a comedy that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. So it’s no surprise that I haven’t seen it; I don’t speak French – and it was released 10 years before I was born! 🙂

Interestingly, I found this 500 piece Re-marks puzzle had poorer quality than the last few 1000 piece puzzles I’ve assembled by the same brand. It could be that I got a puzzle from the end of the run when the die was a bit duller, but usually with a smaller piece count the quality is better. I haven’t done enough 500 piece puzzles from Re-marks to be able to say for certain, but as of now my experience has been that their larger puzzles have better quality.

As per usual, I loved this collage – it was an extremely entertaining and interesting puzzle!

Vintage Tin Toys In Progress

Vintage Tin Toys IP
Vintage Tin Toys by Lewis T. Johnson – Milton Bradley – 1000 pieces

I didn’t actually start assembling this puzzle until yesterday, it was been sitting on my board waiting to be sorted for more than a day. Finally got my lazy butt in gear and started working on it!

It’s much more difficult than I thought it would be, but I find that I’m not at all frustrated with it. Finding the right shape or the right color is still relaxing and peaceful, even if the rate of assembly is a little slower than normal. My daughter chose an awesome puzzle for me, she’s the sweetest❣

My one frustration with this puzzle is that the image on the front of the box is, of course, covered in one area by a banner with information that could have been put elsewhere. There is an image of the artwork on the back of the box with no obstructions, but it’s smaller than the image on the front! So annoying! Seriously, do they think that’s something we puzzlers are looking for?

My eyesight is declining as I get older, and a smaller image isn’t what I’m looking for. If you can’t give me an unobstructed view of the artwork on the front of the box, give me a poster to work from. I realize that it may cost you a few more cents in production, but trust me, you’ll make the consumers very happy and more inclined to purchase your product. Duh! Is this really something you need to be told?!

Sorry for the rant guys, guess I just needed to get that off my chest.

Happy puzzling today! 😎🧩