Beer Caps

Beer Caps by Charlie Girard – White Mountain – 550 pieces

Mom and I finished this in an afternoon while visiting. She didn’t think she was going to like it, but once we got going she was enjoying it. After a while we were doing the same stuff we always do when we’re working on a puzzle together and cracking each other up. Fun puzzle (although neither of us are beer drinkers) – and perfect for St. Patrick’s Day! 🙂

This was the first 550 piece White Mountain puzzle I’ve done, and I was surprised that the pieces were random cut instead of grid cut. I don’t have anything to compare it to so I’m not sure if that is usual for the smaller piece count puzzles or not. It made the puzzle a little more of a challenge, but it was still very entertaining.

My only problem with this puzzle was that the image on the box wasn’t correct. It was just a small deviation, but one that confused us at first. The second beer cap in the bottom row is red in the actual puzzle, but black on the box. It was baffling for a minute before we figured out what was wrong.

Otherwise the quality of the puzzle was quite good, I’ve never had a problem with a White Mountain product. This one was no exception, and was great fun – White Mountain has the best collage puzzles!

Couples

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Couples by James Mellett – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

Another collage – of course. (And another cockeyed picture where you get to see my bedspread 🙂 ) I really enjoy collages, and White Mountain always does them so well. Couples and Valentine’s Day, how sweet! Almost as sweet as the day after when all the candy is 50% off!!!

This was really fun artwork, there weren’t only human couples there were plenty of fun things that make a great pair – chips and dip, cookies and milk, ebony and ivory piano keys, apple pie and ice cream, etc.  Also there were a lot of non-human couples like Bert and Ernie, Buzz and Woody, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Yogi and Boo Boo and so many more.

This is another one that is fun to do with others with lots of laughing and talking about the couples and figuring out who or what things are. And as always, if you’re not sure who or what things are you can check it on the White Mountain website where they have an answer key.

So many great finds at thrift stores! 2 or 3 days worth of puzzle for 99 cents, you just can’t beat that! For mom and I it also leads to buying puzzles online. She finds a cool puzzle at the thrift store, we assemble it and love the quality or artwork and then we end up looking up other puzzles by that manufacturer or artist and buying a bunch online. Yes, we have gone slightly insane, but on the other hand we are adorable and puzzles isn’t too terrible an obsession/addiction, right?

Cookbooks

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Cookbooks by Charlie Girard – White Mountain Puzzles – 1000 pieces

This puzzle was sooooo much fun for me! Lots of words to assemble – love it! A collage – too fun! Cookbooks – I love a good cookbook! (I know I’m weird, but I’m adorable and amusing so it’s ok) 🙂

My daughter got this for my mom. She loves cookbooks even more than I do, I would say she probably has a couple hundred of them at least. 😮 She even has a couple of the cookbooks in the puzzle, and so do I! She loved it, and I assembled it when she was done.

It’s one of the puzzles that I would definitely do over again. I enjoyed looking at the names of the cookbooks and the pictures on the covers were cute, funny, beautiful and sometimes very odd. I love that stuff! This is a great puzzle that I definitely recommend.

Donuts and Pastries

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Donuts and Pastries – White Mountain Puzzles – 1000 pieces

Since I showed the Coffee Cafe on Monday, I figured we’d add some donuts and pastries to go with!

Obviously this is not a picture of the completed puzzle that I did. I do have a picture of that on my completed puzzles 2016 page (April – June) but I must have been having an inner ear problem or I desperately need new glasses because the picture is extremely cockeyed and I don’t have the entire puzzle in the picture. Although if you’re interested you can see a bit of my bedspread at the bottom. 🙂 So I decided it would just be better to show the WHOLE puzzle in a picture. Ta-da!

This was another extremely fun collage from White Mountain. It’s so much fun for me to have a bunch of smaller images to put together, it makes it seem like even a 1000 piece puzzle is no big deal and it goes so quickly! The puzzle was the usual good White Mountain quality, and the image quality was so good it made me hungry. The donuts were interestingly decorated, the backgrounds were fun and all together it was just a great puzzle to assemble.

When I’ve been working on a difficult or challenging puzzle it’s so nice to have a collage puzzle as a palette cleanser. I can pull out a few pieces and assemble them, which leads to the next space and so on.  Not to say one is more fun than the other, the challenging ones are fun for me as well!

If you’re a fan of collages, donuts or puzzles, I highly recommend this puzzle. Yum!

Matchbooks Collage

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Matchbooks Collage by Maureen Rupprecht and Miranda Graham – White Mountain – 1000 pieces

Was this puzzle ever fun!  I am a sucker for collage puzzles and this one was no different, so enjoyable! I had a lot of help with this one too – my husband and daughter and son-in-law pitched in. I forgot that I took this picture before the puzzle was technically finished. I told my daughter she could put in the last piece, so I left it out for her (that’s the piece on the right side). I took this picture and texted it to her so she would know it was waiting for her, but then once she put the piece in I forgot to take a picture of the COMPLETED puzzle. 😉

It was a joy to put together and I can’t recommend it enough. It was entertaining to read all the matchbook covers as it was being assembled (the things they used to put on a book of matches – Wow!) Most of the matchbooks were between 4 and 6 pieces, so it was almost like doing a bunch of tiny little puzzles. Loved it!

The White Mountain brand has some of the most amazing and fun collage puzzles. And their pieces are larger than most companies, so the 1000 piece puzzle is more impressive when finished, it feels like a bigger accomplishment.