We wrapped up the latest from So Puzzled Puzzle Company – 2 Dandelions Bookshop – last night. It was probably about four hours of total work from start to finish.
As I said in the next up post, it was great to work with our local indie bookstore on this one. 2 Dandelions Bookshop has been a supporter of So Puzzled from the start and it was really cool to be able to work with them on a unique way to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day.
We started this one with the edges, as per usual, and then I moved on to the clouds while Jenny did the sidewalk. I expected the clouds to be difficult but they were a little tougher than I thought they’d be as the white lines of the clouds are so faint it’s hard to get a feel for the patterns right away. It’d probably have been significantly more difficult in a 1000-piece edition.
With the clouds done, I moved on to the tree and the tops of the buildings while Jenny did the bench and the store sign on the grey building. We had decided we’d each do one of the signs, so I moved on to the brick building from there while Jenny continued on to more of the grey building.
The books in each window ended up being a little easier than I expected. The grey building’s books are depicted in more muted colors so we were mostly able to split them up appropriately and go from there.
We wrapped things up with the upper portions of the grey building.
Our soundtrack for this one was intended to be our usual classic rock mix via YouTube Music but the algorithm went a little off the rails and started adding in a lot of stuff we don’t normally hear.
This puzzle is currently available at 2 Dandelions Bookshop in Brighton, Michigan, and will be available at the So Puzzled Puzzle Company website soon.
Update; May 2, 2025
So… Funny thing about this 500-piece puzzle.
While we were doing this puzzle we were trading texts with one of our friends at 2 Dandelions, who had started putting her copy together before we started ours. Unsurprisingly, she finished first, and noted that it was harder than she expected. We were surprised and disappointed to hear that but kind of wrote it off as we were chugging along on our copy ourselves.
But remember, I said this about the sky:
I expected the clouds to be difficult but they were a little tougher than I thought they’d be as the white lines of the clouds are so faint it’s hard to get a feel for the patterns right away. It’d probably have been significantly more difficult in a 1000-piece edition.
And remember, it took us about four hours to complete. When was the last time we needed four hours to complete a 500-piece puzzle?
All of these things should have been clues. Unboxing the puzzle should have been a clue. But, again, from the next-up post:
One of the problems we’ve had doing our own puzzles is dealing with the combination of excitement and a feeling of obligation. We want to do the puzzles quickly so that we can talk about them from experience, which leads to us rushing into it and not enjoying the experience as much as we’d like.
Despite trying not to, we rushed into this one. We worked late at night, when we were tired, because we were so excited. And we’re so used to doing 1000-piece puzzles that we didn’t even notice that this 500-piece puzzle wasn’t a 500-piece puzzle.
It turns out that, due to a mistake at the manufacturing facility that So Puzzled Puzzle Company uses, this design ended up being cut into a 1000-piece puzzle rather than the intended 500-piece one. In hindsight, it’s incredibly obvious. But it’s such an out-of-context problem that none of us realized it. We knew it was supposed to be 500 pieces, the box said it was 500 pieces, why would we think otherwise?
After the fact, while showing off the completed design, it was easy to see that those pieces were just way smaller than they should have been. Which led to some comparisons to other SPPC puzzles and the realization that a mistake had been made.
We’re now looking forward to trying this one when it’s actually 500 pieces.
