Painted Ladies Puzzle 
by Guest Writer Roberta Shore

I really enjoyed watching this illustration come together. It is such a striking image. I had fun most of the time. Here’s why . . .

Quality: Loose piece fit and False Fits! * There cannot be anything more annoying! Okay, after taking hours or days to complete a puzzle and having a missing piece might top those things, but it comes at the end. Loose fit starts at the beginning and continues. False fits as well. Here, they happened only in the frame, but trust me, having to take it apart, rearrange, leave the frame off until later — no fun in any of it! As for the rest - the box is sturdy but overly large. Inside was a sealed bag of pieces and info on varying piece counts, missing pieces and the like. (A Clementoni 1000 piece puzzle has 1008 pieces.) No poster is included. The full picture is on the box top. Color match to pieces was very good. There was a small amount of puzzle dust. The pieces have low sheen. They are sturdy, none were together uncut or damaged in any way, none were missing.

Getting started: Find the edge pieces and sort by color. I usually do that, then build the frame, then sub sort out objects, and more defined areas of color. To be honest, I felt lazy, so I did my super sort while finding the edge pieces. That included the light and dark grass, the brick wall, the tree foliage, each house from the eaves to the sidewalk and corresponding recognizable roof parts, the dark colors that were probably the remaining roofs, blue sky, sky with clouds, sky with skyline parts, and the skyline.

Construction: I built the frame because it did have color information to build from. All along, with the top and bottom frame rows being basically the same color, I worried about false fits. When I ran out of frame pieces, both those rows seemed to be missing a piece. I searched for them in my sorts to no avail. I let it go and got to my favorite part — the build. As I went along, I laid out each sort by shape. I started from the bottom; sure enough, false fits became clear. I rearranged the frame edge grass, that frame row now had no holes, I continued. Before I got across the lawn, I had to move frame pieces around again! I prevailed and started building the houses, coming in from each side.

Next, I gave the trees their foliage. Now for the skyline. Yes, I laid out all the pieces by shape, but didn’t even try to sort them otherwise. The rooftops offered some hints, and yes, I reference the illustration on the box. I pieced together some of the buildings and put them where they might finally go. That’s where loose piece fit comes in. Trying to move even a small built section and it falls apart does not make for happy, fun filled puzzling! Because some would connect with the sky, I bothered to rearrange that top frame row to get rid of the errant space that was not a missing piece. The skyline took quite a bit of time, but I was having fun. Some of the sky got filled in at the same time, so that sea of blue no longer looked so daunting.

Until . . . you guessed it . . . false fits! I continued to build upward. I had the last two rows before the top frame and this gorgeous puzzle would be completed. But no, I was maybe 15 pieces in with everything connecting to the top, so close, and bam! - there was no piece that would connect from the second row to the frame. I removed the frame pieces, connected the rest of the sky, and found new homes for the frame pieces.

Final thoughts: Parts of this puzzle were complicated, but with thoughtful sorting, really not that difficult. That is why I said moderately hard. But, in the end, the extra time was so worth it. I am looking at the puzzle and getting past the false fits. It is so strikingly grand!

My ratings: Quality B-, Fun factor A+ (I’m over the annoyances now)

* False fits: I tried to find the definition for it, but Google came up with nothing. Basically, a piece looks like it fits perfectly, and matches its surroundings enough to leave little doubt, but then it ends up fitting just as perfectly somewhere else. It can even be worse than my experience above. It can happen in the middle of the puzzle and somehow not get noticed until the very last piece does not fit the very last space. It becomes necessary to painstakingly look for that false fit, and very possibly many pieces surrounding it will also be involved. At best part of the puzzle will have to be taken apart to get to the false fit. This puzzling anomaly is not our fault!!!!!!!!