Goodwill Store Finds: Sure-Lox "Art Gallery" Comes in at 6750 Pieces in Total

"Art Gallery" puzzles, Sure-Lox, 6750 total pieces

I got up early this morning to drive my granddaughter to Texas A&M University to meet with her advisor so that she could set her fall 2018 schedule (she's one class short of being a junior). That's a drive of almost 80 miles each way, so I was surprised to be back in town by 10:20 this morning - still with time for my usual breakfast stop. And, as I've mentioned before, in the same parking lot is a Goodwill Store, so why not pop in there while I was at it?

I was about to leave the store when it finally clicked that the big green box on the end of the toy counter was actually a collection of ten puzzles rather than the large game that I had been assuming it was. Needless to say, the box didn't stay on the shelf much longer because I truly like many of the images on the cover and the three dollar price was just about perfect. As you can see from the cover, there are five 500-piece puzzles, three 750-piece ones, and two 1000-pieces ones in the box. If my historical odds concerning missing pieces from thrift shop puzzles hold up, that means that roughly two of the puzzles probably have a missing piece or two. 

As you can see from this picture, the puzzles are separately packed in resealable plastic bags - always a good sign as to completeness - and there is a fairly large poster to help puzzlers in their work. Maybe the best thing about this "art collection" is that all of the images are identified by artist - and two of my puzzle favorites are included (a 500-piece Susan Brabeau and a 750-piece Ann Stookey). Other artists contributing to the collection are: Loren Blackburn, Ginger Cook, Alan Giana, Bill Bell, James Coleman, Michael Jackson, and Schaefer/Miles. 

I'm posting several of the puzzle images (despite the wear on the poster that shows up in the photos) so that everyone can get a better idea of what the puzzles in this collection are like - and why I like at least half of them. I'll list the artist name below each image:

Schaefer/Miles, 1000 pieces

Loren Blackburn, 500 pieces

Ann Stookey, 750 pieces

Alan Giana, 500 pieces

Ginger Cook, 500 pieces

Susan Brabeau, 500 pieces

This will be my first experience with the Sure-Lox company. Sure-Lox is a Canadian puzzle company that, I assume, exports puzzles into the U.S. market. A quick glance at the puzzle pieces indicates that Sure-Lox quality is most likely somewhere near the middle of the pack of companies I've experienced in the last few months (this puzzle was produced and sold in 2007).

"Pet Day" Comes Together (The Art of Susan Brabeau)

Pet Day, SunsOut Puzzles, 1000 pieces, 27 x 35 inches, Artist: Susan Brabeau

Of all the puzzles I've worked in 2018, this may be my favorite of them all, and one of the main reasons for that is that I've really fallen in love with Susan Brabeau's art. Brabeau has a special talent for keeping her pictures "real." Her characters all look like real people, the kind you might run into on any given day while wandering around your hometown, rather than a bunch of posed models. This makes her work very distinctive, and I'm always on the lookout for puzzles featuring anything of hers.

Too, I've generally taken a liking to SunsOut puzzles because of the great images that company uses. Most puzzle companies are predictable. You know to expect collages or landscapes from certain companies, Disney stuff from others, etc., but with SunsOut you never know what you might find. And because of their distinctive square boxes, SunsOut is always easy to spot on the shelves, so I see a lot of them.

I hadn't realized just how big 27 x 35 inches was until I finished getting the border pieces all sorted.  This is the largest puzzle I've done this year, and it required just about all the available space on my puzzle board, which is 32 x 40 inches. That didn't leave a lot of room to sort different colors, and that slowed the whole process down a bit.

I finally decided to take what the puzzle was willing to give me, and if that meant putting sections together and linking them to the main puzzle later, that's what I did. But the characters started coming together fairly quickly, and I could see that, as usual, I was going to be saving a lot of dark pieces for the end. Surprisingly, the teacher's coat turned out to be one of the easier parts of the puzzle despite the pattern on the coat fabric. The classroom background and some of the animals would prove to be a good bit more difficult.

But even those sections started happening for me eventually.  As it turns out, the hardest part for me to complete was the big dog in the center of the picture because the dog's fur was sometimes hard to tell from the hair of the little ponytail-wearing girl up front.  Once I began working those two sections simultaneously, it got a lot easier to place those pieces.

And then, when I finally got this one down to the home stretch (after having it on the board for eleven days), pieces started flying into place.  The last 100 missing pieces, as shown here, went into place in just a matter of minutes until I finally reached the most satisfying part of the process - clicking that last piece into place.

I really hated to tear this one down and re-box it, but it's just too large to frame and place on one of the walls of my study. But I have a stack of puzzles that I can see myself working again sometime, and this one is most definitely going into that stack.

(I will be doing an overall rating of the SunsOut Puzzle Company soon.)

Working on "Pet Day" from SunsOut

Currently, I'm working on this 1000-piece puzzle from the SunsOut puzzle company.  I check in periodically at the local Tuesday Morning outlet to see what they have on the shelves (this is, by the way, a great place to get brand new puzzles at about a 40% markdown).  As you can see from the box cover, the pieces are "larger size," meaning that the finished puzzle is 27 inches tall and 35 inches wide.  

I was intrigued by the realistic faces and body-types of this image from Susan Brabeau, and it has not disappointed me. I've been fooling with it for a couple of hours each of the last four days, and it's almost half-done now.  I like the variety of piece-shapes and sizes, and the colors are pretty close to what is represented on the puzzle box (that seems rarely to be the case), and that helps me sort pieces with some idea about where the various little stacks will end up fitting.  My only complaint to this point is that some of the pieces fit together so loosely that it doesn't take much to unlock them without realizing you've done it.  

Here's a look at where I am at the moment - probably won't work on it much more today because I'm watching the Astros vs. Padres game right now, and my guys are struggling to score runs tonight, making it hard for me to concentrate on the puzzle.