January Puzzles

I did a lot of puzzling last month, so I thought I’d do a post looking back at them. At some point these puzzles should feature on here individually, but I just wanted to reflect on a month of puzzling.

Yes, that’s one of my dogs in the background. She’s a frequent companion when I’m working on a puzzle. She likes to bring up a toy and hide it in the blankets or stare at me until I throw it. But the other part of the image is the stack of puzzles. I did 17 puzzles, which comes out to 18,600 pieces. Most of them are Educa brand. I wasn’t quite sure what puzzle to do next, so I started on the sailboat and then just kept going through all of the Educa puzzles in my closet.

As of now, my closet is cleared of Educa puzzles save for a 4000 and a 42,000-piece puzzle. I tried to fit the 4000-piece puzzle on my board, but it was too big for the board. It’ll have to wait for the table I’m going to build. A few of these puzzles were new, but most of them had been sitting in my closet for several months, if not longer. So, it was very nice to work through some of the puzzles I’ve had sitting. It makes me feel better about getting new puzzles because at least I’m not just doing new puzzles.

I can’t say that there were any that I hated doing or that were super challenging. I did enjoy some more than others. One of those more than other puzzles was the Apocalypse puzzle from Heye.

I saw this while looking for another puzzle and immediately wanted it. It was so much fun to work on. There was a lot going on, and I think it’d been a while since I worked on a 2000-piece puzzle. I left this one up for a while after I’d finished it because I liked looking at all of the parts of the image. There’s so much going on from the meteor striking the plane at the top to the guys still continuing their card game to the devilish creatures coming out of the split in the road.

This colorful fabrics was another really fun puzzle. When I started sorting through the pieces, I was a little stumped on where to start, but then I started finding green pieces. From there, I kept working to the left, only going on to the next color when I was mostly finished with the current one. It made for a fun challenge on the puzzle. I also liked seeing the puzzle grow out to the left as more and more of it was complete. After I was done, I started looking for more like it, and I just couldn’t find anything.

This is another one that when I finished it, I wanted to find more like it, but I couldn’t. It did, however, get me started on clearing out my Educa puzzles. I didn’t do this because I hate the brand, but rather because I need to work on doing some of my stockpile. Right now I’m in the mood for photographs rather than drawn images and that’s all that I had of Educa in the sizes I could work on on my table. So, it was convenient. I worked on them in layers, too. I did the sea and then the boat, or the landscape and then the sky.

For February, I’m working through my Buffalo Games puzzles. Hopefully, I’ll see another space develop in my closet.