Great Old Ads by Lois B. Sutton – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

I had such a good time with this puzzle! I chose it because even though it is a collage, it doesn’t immediately look like it’ll be an easy one – this image has more intricate sections and some softer colors and is a little bit of a challenge – but completely worth it.

This was a very good quality White Mountain, and if I was very careful I could have gotten a picture of it standing up. The most surprising to me was the image reproduction; when there is an image with older products, ads, etc. the reproduction can many times be fuzzy and difficult to work with. The reproduction on this puzzle, however, was excellent! There were one or two sections where it seemed much less crisp than others, but that was the artwork on the ad itself rather that the reproduction. On the ads with lots of small printed text you can read every word! (If your eyes are good enough that is).

Um, do you remember hamburgers in a can?? I certainly don’t! Of course my mom made as much from scratch as she could, for no other reason than it was less expensive to make things yourself. She would take ground beef, add a package of onion soup mix, cut up green peppers and mix it all up. She made them into patties with a hamburger press she got from Tupperware or something and those were our burgers. Even though I was NOT a fan of the peppers in my burger, it seems 100 times more palatable than one out of a can!

(Thankfully mom always used green peppers, so the color was easy to spot in my burger and I picked out as many of those little buggers as I could find! Yes, I was and am THAT picky.😋)

I like this section for some reason I can’t really articulate, other than it makes me think of my childhood. We didn’t drink Borden milk, or really use any of their products that I can remember; but it still makes me smile to see this.

How adorable is this? I love the matching aprons on mom and daughter, the little candle holders on the cake that also remind me of my childhood, and the dish itself on top of the image. I have several of my mother’s Pyrex dishes and I think of her every single time they get used.

Even though this was a more challenging image than many of White Mountain’s collages, it was so entertaining that it went together in less than 24 hours. When I know there’s a fun puzzle on the board I can’t help myself and keep sneaking back to it to put in just a few more pieces…

just one more section…

just empty this one tray…

just….

Vintage Fairy Tales by Lois B. Sutton – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

Long time readers of the blog may be surprised to hear this, but I didn’t enjoy this collage as much as I’d hoped to. The fit was NOT good, and the loose, floppy manner in which the pieces fit together was a pain to deal with. A bit of a bummer, as this was one of the new purchases that I was very excited to assemble. Sigh.

White Mountain puzzles have never been a premium quality brand in my opinion, but I always know that going in when I purchase them and deal with their issues because of my adoration and love for collage images. White Mountain and Re-marks both have excellent catalogs of collages, and when necessary I deal with less than premium quality because those kind of puzzle images make me extremely happy.

Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it this time, cause it kinda p*ssed me off. (Part of it could have been that I received two gifted puzzles yesterday from Penny my puzzle posse pal and as soon as they arrived I REALLY wanted to get started on one of them. Who knows?)

Honestly, this puzzle annoyed me because I was so looking forward to it and it let me down in the quality department. I didn’t even want to take any close up pictures this time or talk about any of the books.

Annoyed. Disappointed. A little sad too.

Retro by Lois B. Sutton – White Mountain – 550 pieces

So much fun! As with most collages this one went together quickly and I enjoyed each and every section. There’s just something about these images (and collages in general) that ticks the box for me; assembling them makes me happy.

This was a pretty good quality White Mountain puzzle, with my only concern being a little bit of a loose fit. The reproduction was the best I’ve seen from this brand for a while, I was impressed.

Ah, 8 track tapes. Boy do I have plenty of memories of these! If you’re a young’un you may not know about these – they were like cassette tapes that you cannot rewind. We had an 8 track player in our vehicle when I was young, and listening to Disney movies or songs on them is a treasured childhood memory for me.

8 tracks also remind me of a toy I received for Christmas one year, a 2XL “robot”. It was basically an 8 track player dressed up like a robot that asked you trivia questions and you answered by choosing which “track” was the correct answer. It was sort of like those make your own stories books, you choose where to go with your answers. I know my explanation doesn’t make much sense, but that was the toy and I remember it fondly.

Here’s another thing you may not know about if you’re younger – the test pattern that would come on television at the end of the broadcast day. Where I lived they used to play the national anthem and then a test pattern like this (or others) would be the only thing you could find on tv. Round-the-clock programming was not a thing; and after the late night shows there was literally nothing on tv.

Hi-yo Silver – away! I cannot think about The Lone Ranger without thinking of my dad and watching this show with him on Sunday mornings. It always seemed so stupid to me that the mask over his eyes made it so that no one recognized him; his voice never changed nor did the bottom half of his face. It was a thrilling show at the time, but my memories are mostly enjoying watching tv with my dad. 💗

---

About the title – it’s funny to me that “retro” means different things to different people. What’s retro to me is NOT the same for another generation. The 80s may seem retro to some, but to me it’s the time when I was coming of age – not retro.

Retro is relative, you might say.