Fallingwater

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Fallingwater – Galison – 500 pieces

This isn’t my typical choice for a puzzle image, but the fact that this is a double sided puzzle and that the blueprints for this building is the image on the back piqued my interest and I couldn’t walk away from it. What an excellent idea!

I had a couple of issues with the quality of this puzzle, the first being the very shiny finish on the picture of the house; there was way too much shine, making it very difficult to work on under artificial lights. In fact the shininess of the pieces was part of the reason that I did the majority of the assembly with the blueprint side facing up. Secondly, the fit at times seemed a little mushy; when you tried to fit the pieces together you couldn’t always tell if the fit was correct.

I looked at other Galison puzzles at the store, luckily I was able to take the lid off and look at the pieces in the bag. There was another image that I liked very much, but the pieces were all ballerinas (2 prong, 2 hole) Blech! I prefer pieces to have more than one shape. On the plus side this puzzle had a good variety of piece shapes and once it was assembled correctly the fit was good enough to lift the entire puzzle. Here’s the image on the back…..

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Fallingwater Blueprint

I was all over the place when I assembled this, the edge was put together picture side up then I flipped it over to assemble the blueprint in the center. I thought assembling the blueprint would be interesting, and it was! Once the majority of the blueprint was assembled and the only pieces left were all blue I flipped it over again and let the image assist in completing the remainder of the puzzle. I make no apologies – it was fun!

Telephones

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Telephones by Troy Litten – Galison – 550 pieces

Another new manufacturer – Galison. I liked it! Not love, but not bad at all. 🙂

I love this image, because I love collages and also my dad used to work for the phone company back when everyone had actual land line phones in their houses. We had plenty of phones to play with when we were kids, old phones that would have been thrown away we got to play with. Doesn’t seem that fun in this world of computers and tablets and smart phone apps but children used to play with things that required their imagination. Wow!

I tried assembling this puzzle once before, put together the edge pieces and then put it away – I just wasn’t in the right mood for it. Second time was the charm and I really enjoyed it. I love how a picture like this is so easy to get sucked in to. You pull the pieces for one of the squares, and that leads to the square next to it and so on and so on. So much fun!

The piece shapes were not bad, there were very few pieces that were 2 prong 2 hole. Lots more different shapes! The pieces were on the thin side, but sturdy. The coating was matte and I had no problems with glare at all, and the image reproduction was very good – the colors were crisp and bright. Very good quality overall in my opinion. I love trying new companies!