On my first night of sorting, I was seeing a bunch of pieces that stood out from all the others. For some reason, I decided to pull these pieces out onto a separate tray. At the end of that first night, I quickly took a closer look at these pieces, and found I was able to already make a few connections. I don’t know why, but for some reason these few pieces reminded me of a carrousel you might see…
On Tuesday, November 12, 2019, I officially started working on Around the World. The task of sorting 42,000 small pieces of cardboard is NO JOKE. I have pieces everywhere! Initially, on paper, I thought I would categorize the first rough sort into about 19 categories. As I have been going through the pieces this week, it has turned out to be a few less. Mostly because it’s just too difficult to tell for sure on a lot of pieces what…
This harder than it looks puzzle is finally finished. And after a thankfully short-lived freak out moment over a missing piece, I can put a checkmark on this one and get it glued for Derek’s room. The quality was superb, and I think this one is going to look awesome mounted on his wall. This also means one more thing — Around the World here I come! Woo hoo!!
My boys aren’t as interested in puzzles as they used to be which makes me sad. It’s very bittersweet.
This 1,000-pc. Buffalo Games puzzle puts up a good fight. It has been way more challenging than I thought it would be initially. The quality of the image and the fit has been top notch, and other than the small, 300 piece Wysockis’ I have done recently, it has been the best Buffalo puzzle I have done. Certainly wayyyy better than the piece quality of the 2000 piece Winterland Fun puzzle I did earlier this year by Aimee Stewart. I…
One of my most favorite puzzle “themes” is Christmas or wintery scenes. I most especially love doing them in the middle of the hot FL summer. I know it’s all in my head, but somehow it always makes me feel just a tiny bit cooler to do a winter puzzle when it’s 95 degrees out with a humidity factor making it feel over 100! I also love Aimee Stewart puzzles. She is one of my favorite puzzle artists so of…
Goodwill is one of the best places to find used puzzles for a good price and I personally have had very good luck with them being complete
This snarky collage puzzle of Suzy Toronto artwork makes me smile. I loved doing it, and when I first purchased it at Goodwill, it reminded me of my puzzling friend and fellow blogger, Stacey. She not only loves collages, but is also wild over being able to spell lots of words in her puzzles. So, when I finished this one, I immediately shipped it over to her. It turned out to be an incredibly sentimental one for her so I…
Isn’t this the cutest and most adorable owl? I absolutely love it and had a ton of fun putting this together. It was not nearly as difficult as I feared it would be given the craziness of the image. I started with the yellow eyes first on this one as they were the most obvious standout pieces. It really came together pretty quickly and I was very pleased to see this Goodwill find was complete.
Many people have asked me over the last 8.5 years things like, “what are you going to do with it when its done?”, “where are you going to put it?”, etc. All very good questions and the answers have changed multiple tines over the years since starting Life: The Great Challenge in July 2010. Click here to read my very first post about this puzzle and the start of this blog. Initially, I figured I would hang the puzzle in…