White Mountain "Precious Days" - Somewhat Less than a Precious Experience

"Precious Days," White Mountain, 1000 pieces, 24 x 30 inches

I'm not even certain where I first saw a picture of "Precious Days," all I can say for sure is that I wanted to own a copy from the time that I got that first glimpse of it. But, because I already own a whole lot of unworked puzzles, I didn't rush right out and buy a copy. Even so, it was never far from my mind when I was looking at new puzzles on various websites and in the local shops that sell jigsaw puzzles here in the Houston area. And then one day, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered "Precious Days" for myself - only to place it on the shelf it sat on for the next three or four months waiting for me to pay some attention to it.

Finally that time came, but sadly enough, the experience was less than I hoped for.

I started this one in my usual manner: getting the puzzle-frame built and then moving on to the most logical starting points the puzzle offered me. In this case, the focal point of the puzzle is the big white house and the two side buildings, so I pulled those colors and started putting together the structures.

I was surprised at how quickly the house, barn, and side building came together and how relatively easy it was to link them all the way across the horizontal confines of the frame. Next, it was time to start on some of the rock wall and all that grass in the foreground of the image - and that's when things slowed down a bit.

So I decided to alternate working between the grass and the darker sections of the sky at the top of the puzzle. I found the pace picking up a bit at this point, and that's probably because I wasn't lulling myself to sleep by endlessly staring at only one section of the puzzle. Alternating sections, flipping the puzzle-axis on its ear, etc. are techniques that always seem to jumpstart me when I begin to bog down on a puzzle, and it worked again.

This may not at first glance appear to be much progress, but the sky was coming together all the way across the puzzle.

At this point, I was alternating between the top and bottom sections of the puzzle, and the whole image started to squeeze itself together into one coherent image.

With almost all the grass and rock wall in, I was really starting to feel good about "Precious Days." Little did I know that the rug was about to get pulled right out from under me when I realized that I was really working on a 999-piece puzzle, not a 1000-piecer.

So after 2-3 hours per day for eight days, this is what I end up with...an absolutely stunningly beautiful image with a little white star above one of the big trees in the puzzle. Problem is, of course, is that that "little white star" is a missing piece, meaning that this puzzle will never really be completed - and that instead of finding a display spot on my study wall, this one is destined to be exiled back into its little box some time in the next twenty minutes or so.

Sadly, this whole puzzle-building experience did not come close to meeting White Mountain's normal quality level. In addition to the missing piece, I must have glue-repaired almost three dozen pieces from which the image was peeling from one piece-extension or another. I believe that this damage was most likely done in the separation process because no single piece required more than one repair. It is likely that an overused, dull cutting tool caused this to happen, and it had to be obvious to someone at White Mountain that there was a problem when so many of the pieces did not cleanly separate from their brothers and sisters. This one really should never have been shipped in this condition (and by the way, I got this one directly from White Mountain, not from a retailer).

White Mountain is still among my favorite puzzle companies, but my confidence in their quality control took a hit with this one.