Flannery Winchester

Happy New Year, everyone! It was a busy month so I didn’t quite finish 4,000 pieces individually, but this has been a delightful month of puzzling, and with each solve I could see my technique improving and, often, my times going down! My speed puzzling team and I are competing in the US Jigsaw Nationals in March, and this sprint definitely made me a stronger teammate.

And of course, most importantly, with your support we raised over $1,000 to support Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s advocacy work!! Those donations contributed to us exceeding the overall year-end goal of $1.25 million 🎉

Thank you again for all of your support and encouragement throughout this pledge-a-thon. I appreciate each and every one of you! 🙏🏻

I think puzzle #7 has been my favorite one yet 😍what’s better than stacks of books?! The theme of this puzzle is “banned books,” and it was super fun to solve. I didn’t look closely at the box before starting, so it was exciting to discover what books were part of the puzzle, and to realize how they stacked up. The text made it easier from a puzzling perspective, but it also felt like playing trivia - I could piece the right author name with the right titles as an extra clue!

You’ll notice that the border is pretty consistent all the way around. Because of that, I didn’t start with the border. Instead I worked from the book stacks outward and filled in the edge at the very end. It took me about an hour to get most of the two stacks complete. Doing this one “backwards” was another element that made it fun!

But that also means it wasn’t until the very end that I realized I was missing two pieces, one of which is a corner piece 😭 I had some “help” from my 3-year-old when I was first sorting the pieces this morning, and I also have a ravenous dog who will eat anything that falls on the floor, food or not. (One time he ate a small toy zebra. He’s unstoppable.) So I suspect those two pieces might have dropped to the floor and then been scarfed up. But it’s also possible my son carried them off somewhere. Either way, my official count for puzzle #7 is 498.

Thanks to Cara Beth for gifting me this awesome puzzle!! I promise to keep an eye out for the two missing pieces until we move out of this house 😂

What’s this, a second puzzle update in one day?! That’s right folks 🙌🏻 my toddler had a rare early bedtime tonight so I managed to whip out puzzle #6!

I figured this one was going to be easy because of the distinct color blocks and the text — lots of very easy and obvious clues to follow. But I mostly chose this one because I loved the subject matter. What a celebration of this planet’s biodiversity and the incredible range of creatures who will benefit from our work for a stable, healthy climate!

I completed the edge in about 22 minutes. The next pic is at 1 hour 30. You can tell which squares were a bit tricky — the dik dik and the blue footed booby had similar reddish brown backgrounds, and the hermit crab, spider, and axolotl had similarly dark backgrounds, so I couldn’t sort the pieces for those squares as easily or as accurately. The parts that went the fastest were the squares for the armadillo and the tree toad, and the peacock tail went quickly too.

I ended up finishing the puzzle in 1 hour 37 minutes — 3 minutes faster than the travel stickers puzzle (puzzle #3) so that’s a new personal best 🥇

Next up I’ll be doing a puzzle gifted to me for Christmas by my very dear friend (and one of this pledge-a-thon’s donors!) Cara Beth 🎉

Done with Puzzle #5! I did most of this one in one sitting the night before I left town to visit my family for Christmas. The top photo is my progress after an hour and 45 minutes, which I was pretty pleased with! The lilies were tough so I was avoiding those, and I was struggling to fill in all the borders around the various little things sitting on the table. I got back into town yesterday and finished it up this morning with fresh eyes 🎉

I only have a few days left to finish up my last three puzzles, so I’m going to have to hustle to hit the goal I originally set of completing 4,000 pieces. Let’s gooo!

Puzzle #4 was a fun one! This is the first round puzzle I’ve ever done, and there were tons of false edges so I actually didn’t start with the border this time because at first I wasn’t 100% confident what was an edge piece and what wasn’t. So first I whipped through and did all the obvious butterflies, and then got a feel for the edges so I was able to complete most of the border, though at that point I was convinced I was missing a few pieces.

Then I did a thorough shape sort of all the leafy pieces, because otherwise I would have been searching for those the rest of December 😂 I left the monarchs till last because there were four of them, so I needed the clues of the shapes within the puzzle, rather than just the picture, to put those together.

Finished this one up today with a little “help” from my toddler - he did actually get two pieces together correctly! 🦋