A Thousand Things To Amuse Puzzle-Loving Folks!

Danielle Russel and her parents, Berta and Doug Lockhart evaluated two of our more challenging thousand piece puzzles this winter. Danielle and Doug work together and make all sorts of hand-forged iron items for Lehman’s at their forge and nearly-off-grid home in southern Ohio. Danielle is also planning to raise organic seedlings for sale this summer. Not yet 20, she’s won awards for her smithing, and is one of our newest bloggers here at Country Life. She’s also a big fan of sweets, especially sour gummy worms!

Puzzle #1: Candy Wrappers
Wow! Talk about craving some candy… This puzzle gave off the same vibes as a cook book! If you know your candy (and boy do I!), you can find matches to each piece very easily. So maybe before you start the puzzle you should buy lots of candy to refresh your memory of wrapper colors… And it’s always more fun to have snacks during a puzzle!

We always start with the edges first because that just seems like the way every puzzle should start! Then we all (Papa, Mom and I) start working on putting together a section on our own, which we transfer into the edges.

Anyway, back to the puzzle. Where were we? Oh right, wrappers! You’ll find it very handy knowing the wrapper colors for candy brands. If you don’t, it’ll just make this puzzle more interesting for you. I loved it because although it was fairly easy putting sections together, it was also challenging because some wrappers were older candies and I didn’t recognize them. Papa on the other hand, was showing his age–he knew the brands I didn’t!

This was a good quality puzzle. The pieces are very sturdy and fit together nicely. There wasn’t any question whether they fit or not.  This puzzle took us about six and a half hours (two nights and a morning). We couldn’t keep away from it so we were late for work the last morning when we worked to finish it. Good thing Papa is the boss!

Over all, this was a very fun, relaxing puzzle that didn’t give you a headache from searching too incredibly hard to put sections together! My family would absolutely put this puzzle together again. We all agreed it was the most fun 1,000 piece puzzle we’ve ever done.

Puzzle #2 Pencils
This was the second puzzle we did. All PENCILS. Well, we started with the edges as usual. All was well until all of the border was together. I can honestly say I had no idea where to start!

With this puzzle the only thing that you could count on turned out to be the fonts on the pencils. Matching them up gave you a finished section. If you like enjoy challenging puzzles this is going to be the puzzle for you.

This one definitely wasn’t the easiest puzzle I’ve ever done. Sticking to the fonts is the best  way to “get ‘er done”. It’s kind of an unspoken rule in our family that we must finish a puzzle before we take it apart and out it away. Once we started there was no going back! Usually we finish in two nights, but this one took us about 12 hours total. Most of the time we work together by working on our own little sections outside the border, then we place the sections where they go according to the picture on the box. With this puzzle we had no choice but to use the box as reference, because like I said, the fonts are the key to finishing.
You’ll find there are a bunch of president’s faces on some pencils. Those were fun to hunt down!

On a scale of one to five, five being the hardest, I give the pencil puzzle five stars! The candy wrapper puzzle was a bit easier so on the difficulty scale I give it three stars.

My family really enjoyed both of the puzzles and the challenge. We will definitely be putting together the Candy Wrapper puzzle again.