Winter Puzzling 2025

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.  After having worked some puzzles with my wife’s knitting friends over Labor Day weekend, I was very antsy to get started puzzling.  And in fact, I decided I could not even wait to see if I got any puzzles for Christmas.  So, when I was doing some online Christmas shopping early in December, I bought myself one.

I am always drawn to car puzzles and this one easily caught my eye as it combined real cars with a peddle pusher.  My only hesitation was it was manufactured by the same company that I previously had with the duplicate identical pieces and one missing piece.  But I decided to take a chance.

Since I did not have to wait until Christmas to get started, I opted to begin as soon as I had finished all my Christmas wrapping—on the day after the very beginning of winter—the winter solstice.

As always, my first step is to sort the pieces isolating hopefully all of the edge pieces on my puzzle table.

I decided not to organize them by color since that takes extra time.  I began to connect the edge pieces and with two major colors, brown and blue, it came together fairly easily.  But as often the case, at least two edge pieces were missing.

I have written before that this puzzle brand uses many odd and unusual shapes which makes identifying some of the edge pieces difficult.  Hopefully, I would discover them as I worked.  For now, I decided to get started with the puzzle interior and as usual, I started working at the bottom with the tan and brown colored pieces.

I pulled all of them out that I could find and began to assemble them.  The shades of tan were slightly different on the left and right side of the puzzle which made them easier to place.  As I went along, I also found some of the pieces of the peddle pusher and added them as well.  Once I had most of the shadow beneath the main green car complete, I decided to collect the green car pieces and begin to put it together.

As I worked on the green car, I was able to add some of the red car behind it as well.

I next decided to turn my attention to the other major featured car in the puzzle, the blue Camaro.  As I collected the blue pieces for the car, I also found most of the remaining blue pieces for the peddler pusher.  It was at this point that I thankfully found the two remaining edge pieces.

With the cars mostly filled in, I decided to turn my attention to the gas station itself.  Being in the fore front of the puzzle, it was easy to distinguish its pieces from the smaller buildings in the background.  As I assembled the garage, I also found a few more pieces to the truck.

There were still a few holes in the images, but I decided to work on the top of the puzzle with the tree branches, the buildings fronting the street and of course, the sky to finish off the puzzle.

I enjoyed working on this car-themed puzzle, but I must admit parts of it were difficult.  In fact, my wife joined in working on it one day and after about 30 minutes placing only two pieces, she declared it too hard for her and left.  And speaking of my wife, she gave me my second puzzle for this season for Christmas.

This was a great gift as I have always loved the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman but with its retail price for a true authentic version exceeding $5,000, my only option was to purchase a 1/12 scale version for my doll house.

As always, I sorted the pieces into edge pieces and all others.  I assembled the puzzle frame and could not believe I had one missing piece.  It is hard to imagine how when I touch every single piece in this fashion, that I still mis-sort some of the edge pieces.

As always, I started at the bottom of the puzzle and worked my way up.  As soon as I collected all of the pieces needed for the bottom right side, I discovered the missing edge piece.  Interestingly it was one of the first pieces I had touched.

With the bottom right mostly complete, I decided to focus on the lounge chairs.  I collected all of the wooden pieces and then first assembled the three small chairs on the bottom left.  I figured the remaining wooden pieces would be the large chair in the center.

It was while I was working on these that my wife decided to join in the puzzling, finding this puzzle much easier than the last.  If you zoom in on the photo of the puzzle box, you can see there are several areas with distinctive looking pieces.  Homing in on these, she assembled the light fixture at the top and then collected other characteristic pieces.  And off to the side, she made excellent progress on the Herman Miller advertisement.

Rather than using my typical technique working from the bottom up, I decided to use my wife’s approach and focus on distinctive areas of the puzzle.  Selecting pieces that had easily identifiable colors, I began working on random sections of the puzzle.  This seemed to help fill in the puzzle nicely.

Now I was ready to transfer into the puzzle the ad that my wife had assembled off to the side.

With that addition, I then just had to fill in the remaining holes to complete the puzzle.

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.