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Icing on the Cake Puzzle
by Guest Writer Roberta Shore
We invite you to read Roberta Shore's review on the following jigsaw puzzle. Since she has discovered the advantages of jigsaw puzzling, she has reviewed/journaled several that will be available on this website. Icing on the Cake Amazon Link
Icing on the Cake Jigsaw Puzzle Review
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My Confident Newbie Difficulty Rating; Moderate + easy
Ah — confident newbie, you ask? Well, 9.5 months into this new hobby, and 60 puzzles completed, I feel much more confident about my ability to finish a puzzle. But, I still look at the picture, progress can be very slow, I don’t pick puzzles beyond my comfort level — clearly I have a ways to go to ever get to seasoned.
Difficulty - moderate + you wonder? Well, I really do not think many puzzlers would call this puzzle easy. The “+” is because this is random cut. Springbok seems to take random to its extreme. False edge pieces, tiny pieces, and not too many that look standard. Crazy as it may sound, I like random cut, but it does take some getting used to. It certainly is possible to piece sections together with random cut, but in this puzzle it was more a piece by piece effort for me. More on that in a bit.
Quality: A few faults, but none that took the fun out of this puzzle. The one thing that was disconcerting was the pieces were much less sharp than they appear on the box illustration, or when the puzzle is complete. Sounds odd, but other reviewers had the same reaction. Did they enlarge a low resolution photograph? I don’t know. Given the blur, it was hard to distinguish where a piece was in the picture. So, it was slow going to begin with, but obviously I adjusted to the added challenge, and just had fun. Otherwise, the box isn’t the sturdiest, the bottom of mine came unglued. Inside is the sealed bag of pieces, no poster. The box picture is a fairly good color match, and complete enough. There is a tiny pic on the side that shows the whole picture. There was very little puzzle dust. Piece fit was great - not quite pick up perfect, but very good. The pieces themselves are sturdy, none were together uncut, only one was damaged needing to be glued, none were missing.
Follow the mantra: Find the edge pieces and sort by color. Tricky random cut — some corners are made up of 2 pieces. Sort by color was fairly easy . . . to begin with. Milk chocolate, dark chocolate, cookie brown, blue, white, red, pink, green, shadowy gray. After I build the frame — pretty straight forward here — I usually sub sort out areas of the puzzle, but the initial sort seemed adequate, at least to begin with.
Construction: Well, the lower right corner got done first — sorting the green meant those strawberries could be completed. My first idea was to build from the top down, but that changed when I got to the white icing (whipped cream?) And so the sub sorting began. White with other mottled colors, white that had cookie, White that had chocolate, white that had nothing, purply blue, purply pink, pink with dots, egg brown, table brown, the table cloth, chocolate with any little white area, the cut strawberries, other red, cookie with white, just cookie, cookie with nuts, chocolate cups, milk chocolate swirls, and on and on.
Why? Well, that made it easier to know where they went in the picture to place them in the puzzle. It was all so strange. While building the puzzle, the base of the white dish was shades of pale cocoa brown. In total, you would need to see for yourself what I have tried to describe.
The chocolate layer was last — there were five 7” x 7” trays of chocolate pieces plus some that had already been placed. All that sorting was what made this come together comfortably and be fun. So, maybe not to that extreme, but that’s how I sort. I am fine with the extra time it takes for that outcome alone. I don’t think it will change even when I graduate from Newbie. :-)
This puzzle was so worth the effort — it certainly makes a visual impact, a giant cake minus the calories!
My grades: Quality A-, Fun factor A+
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR - With her self-published book and over 300 jigsaw puzzle reviews, Linda has established herself as a prominent social media marketing influencer and jigsaw puzzle-preneur. If you want to send Linda a quick message, visit her contact page here.
We have collected a massive list of jigsaw puzzles in numerous categories on our Amazon Store link. It's a quick way to browse most current puzzles and/or specific seasons, accessories and themes. Makes for a terrific one-stop jigsaw puzzle gift giving shopping centre. CLICK HERE
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