CEACO 10-Puzzle Americana Collection: Puzzle No. 2

"Americana No. 2" of CEACO 10-puzzle box, 300 pieces, 15 x 11 inches

Like most of you, after I've finished a "large puzzle," and we all have our own personal definition of what constitutes a large puzzle, I slide down to a smaller, quicker one. I've found that alternating relatively quick puzzles with the more time-consuming ones, keeps me fresher and raring to get back to the next more difficult puzzle. The little 300-piecer shown above (an image I really like) was one of those change-of-pace puzzles.

A while back, I found a large 10-puzzle collection by CEACO in one of the Goodwill Stores around me, and was pleasantly surprised to find a $1.99 price on the box...twenty cents a puzzle is hard to beat. There is a puzzle poster in the box for reference when building the puzzles, and the one up above is simply marked on that poster as "2," so I don't know the artist or actual name of the puzzle. The collection includes four 500-piece puzzles, four 300-piece ones, and even two 100-piece puzzles, so I have nine more of these change-of-pace puzzles to go yet.

This is a look at the poster representation of the puzzle and the puzzle's frame. I always try to start with the frame just so that I can get a sense of the puzzle's overall size in relation to the size of individual pieces as quickly as possible. That helps me place pieces more quickly (by going more directly to the right section of the puzzle) when I reference them to the image on the box cover or poster for orientation.

With so few pieces, it was easy to work this one from any direction I chose, so I decided to go with a top-to-bottom approach. By this point, I could tell that the finished puzzle would not disappoint me.

I pretty much kept going in that direction until I came to the pond section of the puzzle. At that point, I started placing the cows, horses, and ducks into the picture. Overall, this little puzzle gave me more fun than I expected it would, and the finished image turned out to be one of my favorite American puzzles. Now, I find myself kind of looking forward to working the other nine.

"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).

Americana-Themed Puzzle Art

A 1991 Americana puzzle titled "Seashore," minus two pieces

It soon becomes obvious to puzzle solvers that several common themes run through the puzzles being produced by a few dozen puzzle companies these days.  Puzzles featuring cats or dogs, nostalgic countryside settings, books and bookstores, foreign cities, cartoon settings, flowers and gardens, memorabilia, fine art, etc., seem to dominate our choices. But of all the themes prevalent today, Americana seems to be the one hardest to escape. Go to any U.S. retailer selling puzzles these days, and Americana-themed puzzles are likely to make up around 25% of what is for sale.

The video featured below helps explain the appeal of Americana style puzzles and why they have been popular for so long.  (I buy vintage puzzles when I can find them, and it is not unusual for me to find Americana pieces from the eighties and nineties.)






I enjoy the images primarily, I suppose, because their idealized take on the past makes me feel good about myself and this country and what we have accomplished.  That's likely to be the primary appeal of this kind of puzzle, of course, but as a little bonus, I'm also learning about a whole subset of artists to whose work I would otherwise never have been exposed; people like: Linda Nelson Stocks, Sheila Lee, Ellen Stouffer, Joseph Burgess, Jane Wooster Scott, and (of course) Charles Wysocki.

Generally, Americana-themed puzzles (at least to me) are a little easier to solve than a lot of other styles because of the dominance of straight lines and the clean breaks between colors that they utilize. I don't know about you guys, but I have the most trouble with subtly blended colors, and the darker those colors are, the harder the puzzle is for me to solve. I seldom have that problem with Americana.

I just took a quick look at the collection of puzzles still waiting for my attention, and I see that I have at least a dozen more Americana pieces on the shelves.  I don't know if these puzzles are sold much outside the U.S. and Canada, but they seem to do quite well here.