We finished this one up last Friday but had to sit on it for a bit while making some announcements via the So Puzzled Puzzle Company socials. It’s Destination Stars Hollow by So Puzzled Puzzle Company!
We didn’t do a Next Up post for this one, so some background… Destination Stars Hollow is an event in Brighton, MI, where local businesses cosplay as entities from the Gilmore Girls TV show, which mostly takes place in the fictional Stars Hollow, CT. Brighton is right in our back yard and Jenny is a Gilmore Girls fan so we decided to put together a design celebrating the event and its participants.
This was a half-year process of wrangling photos (most of which came courtesy of Party Fly Photography) and permissions and putting together the design and getting through production and we’re so glad that it’s here and will be available at the 2025 edition of Destination Stars Hollow.
The puzzles arrived last Friday and we sat down that night to put one together. We initially said we were just going to do the piece sort and put the border together, then stop for dinner and come back to it. We ended up putting off dinner and doing it in one shot.
Our personal preference is for 1000-piece puzzles but this is a 500-piece design to be accessible to the most people. One of the things we’ve learned in talking with other puzzlers is that it seems to be easier for those of us who prefer larger puzzles to step down to smaller ones than to go the other direction.
We didn’t do anything different in production from our previous designs but it seemed like you could really feel the linen paper on this one. And because our 500-piece designs are the same size as our 1000-piece designs, at 500 pieces you get a good size to each individual piece and some nice heft from it. The whole thing just felt really nice.
In addition to the feel, we still really love the random-cut pieces.
The puzzle came together quickly; about 100 minutes from start to finish. As per usual, we started with the edges and then moved into the middle. Since it’s a collage-style design, we were mostly able to find a bunch of pieces we knew went together, assemble a single photo as a mini-puzzle, and then drop that into place. With it only being 500 pieces, though, that was a little harder, as more pieces covered multiple photos than would have been the case in a 1000-piece version.
Jenny was able to move along a little more evenly than I was. I did most of the design for this puzzle, which was a very iterative process, so I kept finding pieces where I would say “I know what storefront this is a picture of” only to get lost because I couldn’t remember where that store ended up in the final version of the design.
Additionally, several storefronts had windows painted with fall leaves, so figuring out which went where was sometimes difficult. And a couple stores are represented more than once.
Again, it was about 100 minutes from start to finish, so none of these difficulties were particularly severe.
As mentioned above, this will be available at the Destination Stars Hollow event in Brighton, MI, from September 19-21. Any remaining puzzles will be available on the So Puzzled website after the event wraps up.
