Artist: Aimee Stewart
Maker and Year: Master Pieces, 2016
Count: 750 pieces
Final size: 24 x 18″
Piece Type/Variety: Random cut, high variety
Piece quality: Good
Skin irritation: Yes, very mild
Also called Mystical Garden, from the ‘Once Upon a Shelf’ series. This was another puzzle I did on-the-go, during my hours at the public library. The last two assembly steps were at home. I had it separated into six panels at first, but then realized my two middle sheets of cardstock didn’t quite cover the center, so I made a seventh panel but then it got too confusing so I cut new pieces of paper for my puzzle/cardboard ‘sandwich’, re-dividing the puzzle in progress into just four sections.
The first time around, I did find it annoying to be spreading out and flipping over the loose pieces all over again, every time I sat down to puzzle at the library table. So this time I folded cardstock panels to fit into the puzzle box, and roughly sorted by color before starting out. Pieces were all flipped upright in the sorted groups, so I could lift each cardstock out of the box by its folded edges, and more or less slide all the pieces straight off onto the table, and only have a few that needed to get flipped over again. That made it go much quicker, and pleasant (I find flipping the pieces kinda annoying). I had the folded-up ends of the cardstock sheets going criss-cross to each other as I stacked them, to keep pieces from mixing between in the box. It worked pretty well.
This is one of those puzzles that I’ve come to realize is not my favorite type. Yes, the picture is beautifully detailed with lots of interesting little things to look at- but the details are all so small and varied that I spend a lot of time peering at the box to figure out where does this bird go?
and this butterfly? (there are so many)
and probably there was originally a poster included, which would have been very helpful, but by the time I acquired it that was missing, so all I had to go by was the image on the box, which was too small for the amount of detail, some which I could barely see at all. I didn’t notice, for example, that there was a fox at all until I picked up the piece with his tail on it. That’s a fox tail! I didn’t know there was a fox in here! Where’s the fox go?
Because the box says ‘Once Upon a Shelf’ in big letters for a long time I thought that was the title of the artwork and I thought of it as mainly a picture about books- and the shelf aspect is why I had it divided into six segments (three rows) at first- but my husband looked closely and said “Oh, is this celebrating the coming spring?” (we were still having some very cold days, though technically it’s spring now)
there’s so much growing bounty and seed packets and flowers and insects and birds and rabbits too:
It was just lovely, but also kinda gave me a bit of a headache!
