Frank Lloyd Wright: Imperial Hotel Peacock Carpet

Frank Lloyd Wright: Imperial Hotel Peacock Carpet

Love these Pomegranate puzzles - just wish they made them with more pieces than 1000.  This was interesting because of the strict symmetry.

Witches' Wardrobe

This was a very fun puzzle that we knocked off in a 2-3 days.  We wanted to get it done in time to glue together, cut up, and send to a friend as postcards - all before Halloween.

It's not by a standard puzzle making company, but was very good quality - we'd love to do more by them.

So then we glued the puzzle together, front and back, and then scored it for 10 postcards, and wrote out the story about Henry the mule, like this:

The individual postcards looked like this:

And all together were ready to mail out every few days like this:

Here's the entire story:

There once was a farmer who owned an old mule named Henry. One day the mule accidentally fell into the farmer’s empty well. The farmer heard Henry braying and desperately calling for help. After carefully assessing the situation and considering the cost of getting a crane to rescue the poor mule, the farmer decided that Henry was not worth the trouble of saving. Instead, he called his neighbors together, told them what had happened, and asked them to help him haul dirt to the well in order to bury the old mule and put him out of his misery.

When the mule heard what was going to happen, he became hysterical and began to bray even louder! The farmer and his neighbors started shoveling dirt into the deep well. When the dirt hit Henry's back, a thought came to him. It suddenly dawned on him that every time a shovel load of dirt landed on his back, HE WOULD SHAKE IT OFF AND STEP UP!

This he did each and every time the dirt was shoveled over him. “Shake it off and step up…shake it off and step up…shake it off and step up!” He repeated this to encourage himself and not lose hope. No matter how painful the loads of dirt felt on his back, or how distressing the situation seemed, Henry, old mule fought panic and just kept right on SHAKING IT OFF AND STEPPING UP!

It wasn’t long before the old mule, battered and exhausted, stepped triumphantly over the wall of that well! What seemed like it would bury him actually helped him . . . all because of the manner in which he handled his adversity.

THAT’S LIFE! If we refuse to give in to panic, bitterness, or self-pity, or let others put us down, then we create for ourselves a way to rise up to freedom.

Cinque Terra

This was a lovely puzzle of Cinque Terra Italy that we very much enjoyed. bear too, as he got to row in the boat in the harbor after it was done.

When we were done with the puzzle we glued it together, front and back, and then scored it to cut into 25 individual postcards:

Here's an example of one of the postcards, viewed closeup. Each one held an inspirational quote:

And another:

And another:

Pirate Bears

this puzzle was smaller than we usually do, but how could we resist?  our pal bear loved it so much, he had to get all dressed up in his own eye-patch too.  Here he is putting in the last piece, which is of course his favorite thing to do:

Then we glued the puzzle together, front and back, and scored it into 16 individual postcards to send to nephew Owen.  Note the really fun stamps too:

Here's an example of what one of them will look like up close: