"The Toy Store" (by White Mountain): Every Kid's Dream

"The Toy Store," White Mountain, 1000 pieces, 24 x 30 inches

It's been a while since I've built a White Mountain puzzle, so I was really looking forward to this one. As it turned out, this one would not be typical of the other White Mountain puzzles I've worked in the last few months, mainly because this is one of that company's "larger pieces" puzzles. I had not realized just how different from the other White Mountain puzzles I've done that one change would make this one.

The biggest impact of the larger pieces was in the way they fit together. At times, the space between adjacent pieces was annoyingly wide and I had to go back and apply a bit more force to them to get the gap to close up a bit. The fit was so loose, in fact, that when the corners of the puzzle inadvertently slipped over the edges of my puzzle board, the pieces would often come apart - and I really messed up at one point when I let that happen while a corner of the board was over open air. About thirty pieces dropped almost three feet and spread everywhere, costing me about ten frustrating minutes putting them back in place. The looser fit associated with these larger pieces also means that the "lines" between the separate pieces are much more obvious than usual when looking at the finished piece...something else I'm not crazy about.

The only surprise that I got in the initial sort was finding that this one would be near-impossible to sort by color (other than the store's wood floor, the red dress, and the yellow dress).  But that would not turn out to be a problem at all since the larger pieces made it easier to pick up a piece and know almost immediately what general section of the puzzle it belonged to. As usual, though, I missed half-a-dozen edge pieces in that first pass through the box.

It seemed logical to start with some of the figures in the store, mothers and their children, but I could not wait to build the six White Mountain puzzles that are prominently displayed on the shelves of this toy store, so I started there. (Those are actual White Mountain puzzles, including even two that I have on my shelves right now for later fun.)

As you can see, I worked on a few of the shoppers and even a couple of toys, but I kept coming back to those tiny puzzles. Go figure.

Things were really coming together at this point.

This is the point at which I started feeling like I was in the homestretch. The remaining pieces, even the wood floor, started coming faster and faster to their final resting places, and the puzzle was complete before I knew it.

Overall, this was a really fun puzzle to work, bringing back lots of great memories along the way since I am a child of that era. It is a relatively fast-paced puzzle that offers sufficient challenge for most puzzlers, so I'm going to put this one on my "keeper" shelf for revisiting in a year or two (like that ever really happens).