This was one of the more difficult 750-piece puzzles I’ve done. All those pink azaleas in the background was very reminiscent of Quite Fetching! Not to mention that it’s a photograph. An altered one though, I think. The butterflies looked a bit off- the way they were posed, so many so close together- and peering very close, you can see the tiny legs don’t quite sit on the flowers in a natural way. I really think only the dark-winged one on the upper left side (that’s facing to the left) was part of the original photograph, and the others were all pasted in. Pretty good job, but still! The butterflies were fun to do, and a tad easy. It was all the pink flowers that gave me a headache. Very standard ribbon cut, with the one extra variation of some wavy edges instead of knobs / holes. It didn’t get easy again until I was down to the last twenty pieces, and could more readily pick out shape matches. Three missing pieces. I made replacements to patch in. My first attempt with colored pencil on white cardstock wasn’t bold enough, couldn’t get the background dark to blend in. Used markers on thin cardboard instead (three layers) and that was a much better match.
Husband picked out the replacements right away (but he’d seen where I was working on them). Turns out two are a tad too dark now, and the layer of tape I added made them a bit too shiny- but from a distance or at a glance you don’t really notice them, so I’m satisfied enough. I left this one out on the table for a day just to admire my handiwork.
Funny thing, when I first spread out the pieces on the table, I found a surprise- someone else’s handmade cardboard puzzle piece! Much larger, and roughly made. Of course I’m curious about that, but I’ll never know.
An easy, quick puzzle after the 
This beautiful puzzle was so difficult. Good quality, and a lovely funny triangular piece cut (like the 
A Dinotopia puzzle. I’m not an actual Dinotopia fan, but there was a large beautiful book from the series in my stepson’s room. I much admired the pictures- the artist is really good at doing children’s faces, the soft features and expressions so natural.
This was bound to happen to me someday, acquiring used puzzles as I do. Even for its age (made almost twenty years ago) this one was decent in quality. The pieces have average shape variety, they’re a bit on the small side and a tad too shiny, but that’s okay. Problem is who donated this to the thrift store: it’s missing a ton of pieces. I noticed right away when I was sorting out edges, that I was hardly finding any. A five-hundred piece puzzle, and this was all the edges I got:
That couldn’t be right. I put all the dark ones on a lighter board, to visualize easier. Nope, no more edges.
Spread out the lighter pieces carefully: no more there, either.
At this point I realized it was probably very incomplete. Why did I put it all together anyway? I suppose I was curious to know if just the edges were missing, and how bad it was. In fact the curiosity and aggravation drove me so much, I ended staying up way too late last night working on this one (which is why some of the photos in the middle of the assembly shots have different lighting).
Pretty bad, turns out. I counted at the end. Ninety-five pieces missing. Wow. This one is going to turn into crafts, or maybe just get tossed in the recycling bin. Shame. 
This is an older puzzle- from 2007. Style of the logo on the box is different. Puzzles by the same company are very popular I see them all over the place nowadays, but just know- they won’t last. I don’t know how many hands this one went through before mine, but it had plenty of layers peeling up off the pieces (I only glued a few of them back down, then gave up) and quite a few bent knobs. Someone before me had taped the picture layer back on one piece- little bits hung over the edge but it still fit in place just fine. Remarkably, no missing pieces!
This was such a nice puzzle, relaxing and done in just a few days. I love the quirky odd piece shapes. Colors are kind of muted, but once the brighter colors were fitted in, it looked nice. I wouldn’t usually have started with the pussy willow stems section, but two of the edge pieces on the top didn’t actually hook together, just had flat sides against each other, so I felt I had to start there, to hold everything in place.
For just over five hundred pieces, this puzzle was hard. But a fun kind of challenge. There were several days I didn’t work on it at all, or only fitted a few pieces in per sitting, so didn’t take a progress shot. Sometimes I had to just step away from it for a while, and when I came back, able to see things clearly again. It took me two weeks to complete!
I’ve been spending just as much time of my free time puzzling as reading, lately. So here’s another one. While the picture isn’t a big favorite of mine (my eighteen-year-old commented on how old fashioned it looked) I really enjoyed putting this one together. The pieces had such crazy shapes! Some perfectly ordinary two knobs, two holes. And then all kinds of weird shapes, some very skinny, others tiny little wedges. Quite a few that looked like edge pieces, but weren’t. I didn’t mind at all, in fact I find these the most fun to assemble.
