Aquarius Mystery Solved - Doh!

"That's All Folks," Aquarius Puzzles, 1000 pieces, 20 x 28

Well...this just stinks. I was really enjoying this puzzle, and it was going very quickly because it's largely made up of primary colors. I knew that when I started working on the "words" in the puzzle that things would slow down, and I was more correct about that than I realized. The yellow pieces with red lines look very much alike when chopped up and spread out into one pile, and that was bad enough. But I finally got into a good rhythm and worked my way through all the pieces, only to find that there aren't enough of them there to finish the word "Tunes." 

I am at least TWO, and probably THREE, pieces short in this puzzle already, and I know this at the 400-piece mark on my progress toward completing it. Believe me, these yellow pieces just jump out at you, so if they were still in the remaining stack of pieces, they would be easy to find. Now, no matter what happens with the rest of the pieces, the puzzle is doomed to have a big, very noticeable, hole in it. That takes away much of the fun of completing this one now, but I imagine I'll trudge on to the finish line anyway.

Note: This is only the second Aquarius puzzle I've ever built, both of them bought brand new. The first one was a 1500-piece Coca Cola posters puzzle that had one piece missing in the left vertical border (and again, I knew this very early on because I always complete the puzzle's "border" first). Now this one has at least two pieces missing. 

EDIT: Lesson learned...look closely at the picture and you will see what I just noticed finally: by sliding the "E" down to the "S" I get a clean fit and all the pieces are suddenly accounted for. Doh! (The lefthand side of this row was tied in to the border and I thought I had the right angle...nope.)

"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.)

Tweety, Daffy, Bugs, Sylvester & Friends

"That's All Folks," 1000 pieces, Aquarius Puzzles, 20 x 28

My current puzzle is one featuring some of my favorite cartoon characters from way-back-when.  I have always preferred the Looney Tunes cartoons of the day over those of the slicker, sweeter Disney ones, so this one jumped off the shelf and into my hands when I spotted it at Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago. 

Aquarius consistently produces high-quality puzzles, and this one is no exception. On this particular puzzle, though, the colors are the thing: bright primary colors faithfully reproduced to closely match those on the box. As I've often noticed, however, the Aquarius boxes have a little quirk about them in that the cover photo never seems to be cropped to match exactly the actual image produced by the puzzle pieces.  That can be more than a little confusing sometimes.

Anyway, the basic sorting is all done, and it's time to start assembling the end pieces - and, if things run the way they usually do, I'll be going back into the sorted stacks to find the five or six end pieces I missed on the first pass through.

Goodwill Store Puzzle-Finds (Persistence Pays Off)

Shopping for jigsaw puzzles at Goodwill Stores can be hit and miss, but at those prices, it's hard to go wrong. You're not really risking a whole lot of money, after all. For instance, I found these three puzzles at one of the Goodwill Stores near my house this morning - and paid a whopping $5.12, including tax, for them.

The White Mountain and the Ravensburger puzzles were both marked at $1.99 and the Colorluxe one was marked the same but was on sale for 75% off.  So if there are a piece or two missing, it's really no big deal.

The surprising thing to me this morning was to find ANY puzzles in this particular Goodwill location marked at less than $4.99 (a price I consider too high to take a chance on used puzzles) because they have insisted on that price for the last few months even though the puzzles just sat there gathering dust.  It appears that someone there wised up and got their prices in line with the other Goodwill locations I visit from time to time.  I had given up on even visiting this particular location, but it's definitely going back on my list now.

Puzzles I Don't Have Yet

"Harvesters," D-Toys, 1000 pieces, 26.75 x 18.50 inches, $17.95

This beauty is one of the beautiful "Harvester" paintings done by France's Julien Dupre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I love just about all of those paintings, but this is the only one I've ever seen in puzzle-form. I'm a little hesitant to purchase one because I suspect that it will be a lot tougher than it looks.  But, hey, that's why they call them "puzzles," and one day soon this one is coming home to me.

In case you want to beat me to it, I know that Puzzle Warehouse sells it for $17.99 plus shipping at the moment. I've seen it elsewhere for around $20, so this may be the best price available.

This is the beginning of my "Wish List" series, and puzzles shown here will be cross-linked to a Wish List summary page.  You can never have too many puzzles, but you only have so much storage space...so this is my virtual closet.

Favorite Puzzles: "Oh, I Wish He Was Ours," - Civil War Art by Mort Kunstler

This is one of my all-time favorite puzzles - for a lot of reasons - but mainly because I have spent so many hours reading Civil War history, visiting battlefield parks, and visiting Civil War museums that I feel a close kinship to soldiers on both sides of that terrible conflict.  It all started for me when my grandmother shared memories of her own grandfather, a man who survived the Civil War despite having seen action in a Louisiana infantry unit during some of the Civil War's major battles (Shiloh and Vicksburg, for instance).  It still amazes me sometimes that I heard stories from her that she had heard directly from him.  That really compresses time and helps me comprehend just how young a country the United States still is.

"Oh, I Wish He Was Ours" by White Mountain, 1000 pieces, 20 x 27 inches

Puzzles like this one are getting hard to find at anything resembling a reasonable price.  Why?  Look no further than that red battle flag up in the corner, and you will have your answer.  That flag just may be the most politically incorrect thing in this country right now because of how it's been misused by radical racist groups to intimidate minority populations.  I understand...but I love Mort Kunstler's Civil War art and do not believe that these puzzles should be taken off the market because of what a few idiots have done.  The folks at White Mountain will tell you that they just didn't sell well enough to justify prouction, but I have to wonder if there is not more to it than that.

"Oh, I Wish He Was Ours" is part of a whole series of Civil War produced by White Mountain, but interested collectors should be warned that, if they don't already own the puzzles, they will have to pay dearly for some of them on the collector's market ($50-$100 per puzzle).  

Here are some of the other Civil War puzzles produced by Kunstler and White Mountain:

Chamberlain's Charge, 1000 pieces, White Mountain

"The Civil War," 1000 pieces, White Mountain

"Magnolia Morning," 1000 pieces, White Mountain

"Generals Brought to Tears, " 1000 pieces, White Mountain 

"Model Partnership, " 1000 pieces, White Mountain

"Candlelight & Roses," 1000 pieces, White Mountain

I have only two others of the ones pictured here ("Soldiers Brought to Tears" and "The Civil War") and have been saving them for later. In the meantime, I'm always looking for reasonably priced copies of the others.

Wish me luck.