Pattern 4

On April 28, 2018 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles2 Comments

I am completely in LOVE with this image! It isn’t my best picture – it’s a bit fuzzy at the bottom, which I didn’t notice until I had already disassembled it. My apologies. 😪

This Milton Bradley puzzle was very good quality, I was impressed! The pieces have an excellent feel to them and are a good thickness. The fit was exceptional – you can barely see the piece shapes in the finished puzzle – it would be perfect to frame and hang as artwork. The colors are amazing as well, and it made for an all around wonderful assembly.

When I was a child my mom used to buy these extremely interesting “coloring books”. They weren’t your typical pictures for children; they were intricate patterns to fill in with color, very much like the patterns in this puzzle. We weren’t even allowed to color in the book itself (it was more like a pad of paper than a book), she would photocopy the pattern and we could color on the copies only.

For me it was much more fascinating to color these patterns than the average coloring book for children and I spent many an hour with my colored pencils or crayons designing new color palettes for my favorite patterns. Mom was a pretty smart cookie to copy the pages, it made only a couple of these books last us for years.

This puzzle was exactly what I was looking for and I had the best time putting it together! It was part of a recent group of smaller piece count puzzles that I purchased to keep me stocked up while waiting for my puzzle mojo to come back. I’m so glad that I found this one, because it was so entertaining to assemble and the image is absolutely gorgeous. Now I’m on the hunt for patterns 1-3!

Private Library

On April 27, 2018 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store Puzzles2 Comments

I usually have relatively strong feelings either way about the puzzles I’ve assembled. It’s usually “loved it” or “where is the lighter fluid?”. For some reason this puzzle just makes me think “meh”; I’m even feeling blah about typing up this post. 😐

Springbok has some great puzzles, and although I’m not a fan of the super tight fit I’ve had a great time putting together many different Springbok images. There’s something about this one though, it just seems neither here nor there. It’s pretty, but wasn’t overly inspiring or entertaining to assemble. It could very well be that I was just in the wrong state of mind when putting it together; or it might be that this image just didn’t make for the kind of puzzle that I enjoy.

This puzzle is from the late 80’s, and the quality was good. The fit was extremely tight, but the pieces were very thick with an excellent variety of piece shapes. The image itself is quite dark, but the finished puzzle is actually very pretty.

You can’t fall in love with them all; if there aren’t any valleys you wouldn’t know how much you should appreciate the peaks, right?

Construction Crowd

On April 26, 2018 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store PuzzlesLeave a comment

This puzzle was a fun image to assemble, even though there was a missing piece. I think all the children’s puzzles mom bought from the thrift store that day might have come from the same child – perhaps they didn’t take care of their puzzles. Or it could just be that they were roughly handled at the thrift store, you never know.

As usual with a Ravensburger puzzle the quality was excellent. I didn’t think I’d enjoy the image as much as I did; assembling the different vehicles was a lot of fun! I’m not sure if I’d want it as a larger piece count puzzle, but for only 60 pieces I found it pretty entertaining. 😎

If you’ve got a little one in your life who enjoys construction vehicles and puzzles, this one is definitely recommended.

Spring Dance

On April 25, 2018 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles, Thrift Store PuzzlesLeave a comment

Spring Dance was much less difficult than I thought it would be and I thoroughly enjoyed assembling it. Mom and I swore off flowers for a while, but I couldn’t resist those quilts and gave it a go anyway.

This puzzle comes in a metal tin, which is not great for using the image on the lid for reference. The picture is so small that it’s barely useful, I just had to go with the shapes and colors of the pieces. The quality of the pieces were good; thinner but sturdy pieces that fit together very well.

I’m still struggling with being able to sit and puzzle for any length of time, so 500 pieces or less is mostly what I’ve been working with lately. There are stacks and stacks of 1000 piece puzzles both here and at mom’s house, but they’re just too much for me most days so I’m hanging out with the smaller ones for a while – we’ve become quite good friends!

Travel Around the World

On April 24, 2018 By Stacey at myjigsawjournalIn Jigsaw Puzzles2 Comments

Today’s puzzle was completed by a reader from the UK who has completed MANY large piece puzzles – congratulations on your achievement Derek, it looks beautiful!

This is the current World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle at 48,000 pieces and is made by Grafika, a French puzzle manufacturer. The puzzle comes in 24 bags of 2000 pieces each, much easier to deal with than some sections of the larger piece count puzzles; and storing the completed sections would be easier as well. The image forms a world tour that represents countries and places from every continent – stunning! The finished puzzle measures approximately 25.2 feet long and 6.7 feet high (768 x 204 cm). It’s absolutely breathtaking!

Derek says it’s the best quality jigsaw puzzle he’s ever worked on. Wow! That’s saying something, because he’s worked a LOT of different puzzle brands. I’m dying to try a Grafika puzzle, but they’re not very readily available here in the US.

The colors are soft and beautiful, I bet it’s gorgeous in person! Derek raises money for charities by auctioning off the final 10 pieces of the puzzle, giving a few people a chance to “complete” the World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle – isn’t that a great idea? I love it! So far with this puzzle he’s raised about £6000 for cancer research and the Yorkshire Air Ambulance – amazing!

To date Derek has completed two 32,000 piece puzzles, a 24,000 piece, two 18,000 pieces, a 13,200 piece, and two 9,000 pieces – and he raises money for charities with every one – what an awe-inspiring accomplishment! All of his puzzles are framed and on display at his place of work, Dove Mill. I’m definitely inspired by both his dedication to puzzling and his use of puzzles to help raise money for charities that are important to him.