Vintage Travel Guides

IMG_3662
Vintage Travel Guides by Aimee Stewart – Ravensburger – 500 pieces

What’s not to love about this puzzle? It’s a collage with plenty of words to put together, it’s a Ravensburger, and the artist is Aimee Stewart – that’s like the trifecta of awesome!

Mom and I assembled this together on an afternoon visit and we absolutely loved it! The colors are beautiful and work together amazingly well, it’s just an all around excellent image for puzzling. I have yet to find an Aimee Stewart puzzle that I haven’t liked, and there are still many more I’d love to own and assemble. There’s a puzzle of hers that is very similar to this one called The Christmas Library; it shows shelves of vintage Christmas books, is 1000 pieces and is absolutely stunning! It’s in my pile of puzzles to be done and I’m planning on assembling it a little closer to the holidays, if I’m able to hold out that long. 😉

Ravensburger is my favorite puzzle manufacturer, and the quality was excellent as usual. The pieces feel wonderful and fit together satisfyingly, and the image reproduction is crisp and extremely detailed. Aimee Stewart and Ravensburger are a heavenly combination in my opinion, and I always look forward to and enjoy working her puzzles.💖

Cat’s Got Mail

IMG_3666
Cat’s Got Mail by Bryan Moon – Ravensburger – 300 pieces

The large piece Ravensburger puzzles are so good! This is a 300 piece puzzle and the finished image is VERY big – 27 x 20 inches! (70 x 50 cm) That’s the average size of a 1000 piece puzzle. 😮 It’s quite impressive looking and feels like a big accomplishment!

I enjoyed the difficulty level of this puzzle, it was a bit of a challenge and took me longer than a 300 piece would normally take. Not too easy, not too hard – it was just right! I typically don’t do cat puzzles, but I enjoyed this one very much. Mom’s been finding some awesome images at the thrift stores lately and they’ve been so fun to work.

I am having a great time with the smaller piece puzzles. Maybe it’s because I spent the better part of 6 months working on one enormous puzzle, I’m not sure. But I really do enjoy the smaller piece counts as well as the puzzles 1000 pieces and above. Perhaps I just love to do puzzles, no matter the size! 🙂

 

Gormiti

IMG_3661
Gormiti – Ravensburger – 200 pieces

Absolutely gorgeous colors and excellent pieces! I think this is my first 200 piece Ravensburger; quite a bummer that a piece was missing. 😒

I have found, through my extensive thrift store puzzle “research” that children’s puzzles seem much more likely to have missing pieces than adult puzzles. Children are usually a little more careless with their things – I know I certainly was as a child; it’s not really surprising when there’s a missing piece. Sometimes when the puzzle is such excellent quality it’s a bit of a downer, but those are the chances we take buying used.

I’m not familiar with the toy or tv series, but my children don’t usually watch cartoons anymore. Regardless, I loved this puzzle. Here’s hoping our next 200 piece Ravensburger has all of it’s parts. 🙂

Dad’s Shed

IMG_3660
Dad’s Shed by Michael Herring – Ravensburger – 500 pieces

I really enjoy Ravensburger’s large piece puzzles; the pieces feel thick and amazing and it seems like the puzzle goes so much faster with the larger pieces.  This was another thrift store find, of course. 🙂

It’s a nice picture; but it’s very brown, and not a picture I would normally choose. Although it’s only 500 pieces it took me a little bit longer than normal – there was a LOT of browns. Still, it wasn’t too bad an assembly. I prefer more colors to work with, but that’s just me. Even though the image itself isn’t my cup of tea, the quality of the puzzle made all the difference.

Puzzling is a very tactile experience for me; I find myself rubbing my fingers over the pieces when I’m thinking and I always run my hands over the puzzle during and after the assembly. Working with a premium puzzle makes most images, even ones I wouldn’t normally do, more enjoyable for me. So when we’ve got a puzzle with excellent quality, but not my preferred kind of artwork I usually go for it. Most of the time I end up enjoying it in spite of myself. 🙂

 

Disney Pixar Movies

IMG_3604
Disney Pixar Movies – Ravensburger – 1000 pieces

This assembly was definitely a family affair – fitting for all the family movies in this puzzle. My sister-in-law, 2 nieces, a nephew (in-law) and myself all worked on this puzzle. Whew!

I sent this puzzle to my sister-in-law as a hostess gift of sorts. My husband and I, along with his two brothers were going to be staying with her for a few days. As a gift for being so brave in putting up with all of us I sent her two puzzles – for a few reasons. One, she enjoys puzzles; and two, it’s nice to have a puzzle sitting out in the house, especially when you have guests. Also, I may have wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t have to go 5 whole days without working on a puzzle. 😇

It’s hard not to stop and look at a puzzle in progress, and you end up adding a piece or two if you can. Before you know it people are sitting and working on it together and having a great time. That’s exactly what happened here. This puzzle sat out for a couple of days and several family members stopped to look and to help assemble it. It takes a bit of pressure off of the host feeling that the guests need to be entertained, we were entertaining ourselves with the puzzle! 🙂

The image here was perfect for a puzzle many people were assembling, it wasn’t too difficult to pick out the pieces for one section to work on. So while one person was assembling A Bug’s Life, someone else was working on Monsters Inc. We all had a great time working on it and were pretty proud of ourselves when we finished it. Excellent Ravensburger quality, with an image both kids and adults could enjoy. Great puzzle!