Winter Puzzling – 2024

Winter is essentially over (thankfully) which means it is time to bring you my annual winter puzzling story.  If you have read my previous posts, you know that I typically start sometime in December and then continue through the end of January, the National Puzzle Month.  New Year’s Day is typically one of my biggest days for puzzling during the month as I combine two of my loves: puzzling and watching exciting college football games for most of the day.

And this year was no exception although it was an abbreviated puzzle season for me over years past.  Thanks to my wife, first up was a new puzzle she gave me as a Christmas present.  And it was a fun looking Christmas scene of a toy store from one of my favorite puzzle manufacturers.

In anticipation of spending most of New Year’s Day puzzling, I started sorting the pieces of this puzzle on the 30^th of December.  I considered trying to sort them into some of the predominant colored themes as I searched out the edge pieces but decided that would take too long.  However, knowing that I would start at the bottom of the puzzle as I usually do, I did at least sort the snowy pieces into one of the four drawers I have on my puzzle table.  With the table set, I was ready to begin my puzzling day on the 1^st.

And before the first bowl came on, I had almost assembled the edges.  With my careful sorting of the pieces, I only found two were missing.  The first was easily located but the second proved more elusive.  However, I did find it in the last drawer I looked in to complete the puzzle edges.

After I had mostly finished the bottom snow scene…

…I proceeded to focus on several other prominent colored areas of the puzzle.

Having mostly filled in the bottom and the two sides, I decided to focus on the top of the puzzle.  To avoid having to stretch across the entire puzzle to reach the top, I decided to turn my puzzle table upside down to make it easier.  This allowed me to more easily make good progress on the top without straining my back.

At this point, I was unclear where I should focus next and so decided to try to fill out the two window shoppers since they had unique coloring.  This then led me to begin working on the window scene which I figured would be difficult with so many different images and colors.  But the window frames actually made this less challenging than I thought and so made some good progress.

With just about 150 pieces left, I knew I was in the home stretch and after just a couple of more sessions, I finished it up.

You will notice it is no longer on my puzzle table.  After spending so many hours building it, I always hate to just take it all apart.  So, another advantage of using a puzzle table is that the puzzle easily slides off onto a different surface.  And with it now sitting at the end of our kitchen table, we can enjoy seeing it every day while I work on my next puzzle.

For my next puzzle, I decided to take a risk and go back to one I bought three years ago during the pandemic.  If you read my Winter Puzzle post from 2022, you know that one of the puzzles I worked on not only had a duplicate piece but sadly a missing piece as well.  Which likely meant that someone else had my missing piece and I had theirs, no doubt a result of manufacturing issues during the pandemic.  After that frustrating experience, I shelved this second one from the same manufacturer, unopened, another puzzle from the days when I was trying to find as many as I could about the historic Route 66.

Finding it my closet, I decided to give it a shot.  As usual, I sorted pieces separating out the edge pieces as I organized the other pieces within my puzzle drawers and on top of my work surface.  It was easy to recognize the bottom purple pieces and the top sky-blue pieces and in no time, I had the frame done.  Since the box photo was fairly small, this puzzle also included a large poster that would make assembly easier.

With the frame complete and surprisingly with no edge pieces missing, I decided to first focus on the most prominent car, the white convertible Camaro.  Pulling out the white and orange pieces, I realized there was also an orange truck, so I did both at the same time since the orange pieces had to go on one or the other.  With those two complete, I next moved onto the antique yellow roadster.

As I finished the yellow car, I found the blue posts holding up the large marquee sign were a part of the last pieces completing the roof of the car.  With such distinctive features, I knew both signs would be fairly easy to assemble.  Also, all of the remaining yellow pieces that did not go into the car would either go into the signs or the building.  I easily tackled the signs and the building and then decided to focus on the three red cars near the Camaro.

Completing those three, I just had two cars left: the black car in the center of the puzzle and the blue trailered car next to the building.  These proved quite challenging as their dark colors were almost indistinguishable from other similarly colored pieces of the parking lot.  The house in the background used some of the same dark blue colored pieces so I finished it as well.

At this point, I just had the purple and blue parking lot pieces left along with the sky and trees. Preferring to work at the bottom of the puzzle, I decided to finish the parking lot before venturing into the sky.  I completed this and then moved onto the trees and sky.  Once I completed the trees and was ready to move onto the sky, I could see I was already going to be missing one piece.

None of my sky pieces had the little red tab from the sign on them.  A bit discouraged, I moved onto working on the sky.  But then, when I had added all of the remaining sky pieces, I saw I was missing another piece.

Well, I thought, this puzzle was worse than the one two years ago since instead of just one missing piece, it had two.

As I stepped away from the table, I just happened to look down and see one of the pieces on the floor. Encouraged, I got out a flashlight to look under the couch next to my table.  Immediately, I saw the last missing piece.  It was very satisfying to snap in these last two pieces.

Well, I hope you enjoyed hearing about my winter puzzling season this year as much as I enjoyed working on them.  Hopefully those of you out there that are also winter puzzlers enjoyed the season and had fun too!  January is my least favorite month of the year because of the cold wintry weather but puzzling has always helped me make it through the month.

Because when it’s cold and wintry outside, what is better than to be inside where it’s warm and feel the satisfaction of snapping piece after piece into a puzzle as you watch the image slowly appear.