Play Like a Two Year Old

Our granddaughter received some Play Doh for her 2nd birthday. With her encouragement, I started playing.

I even bought myself my own set of dough and some implements. I never had a set like this as a kid. I figured it was about time.

On my own, I only played for a few minutes while backing up my computer. Predictably, I made a heart

with some details:

It's good for me to stretch this "creative play with no specific end in mind" muscle. I rarely engage in messy, unstructured play. Even before I started, I checked Pinterest for some ideas and a jumping off point. Confession: I literally had to mess up my tools before I took this photo because I tend to line things up in rows.

Somehow, little Abby doesn't need to do that.

Puzzle Season - 09

This last puzzle Dale and I finished to date is another illustration by Charles Wysocki. As distasteful as the last one was for me, the opposite is true for how much we both enjoyed putting this puzzle together.

This Americana scene is called Devilstone Harbor. Like so many of Wysocki's images, it's in three parts: The downtown street scene with the commercial shops, the outskirts of town with countryside in the background, and the horizon scene that has the waterfront.

There are always lots of character in the details:

And as usual, an American flag flies proudly over the town.

In troubling times, it's nice to take a break from "real life," put a puzzle together, and think of the kind of America we long to have.

View from Above

I climbed the hill behind the lighthouse for an alternate point of view.

Puzzle Season - 08

The second puzzle Dale and I put together in January is called All Good Things are Wild & Free. It's a quotation from Henry David Thoreau's essay, Walking. There's a lot to like about this puzzle.

It's manufactured by Flow, an international brand that celebrates mindfulness, creativity, and the simple pleasures in life. The illustration is by Dutch artist Valesca van Waveren.

The little camping and bug vignettes are sweet.

But one thing about puzzles made by smaller companies is that their quality can be lower than the standards of more established puzzle makers. Here, the cardboard is nice and solid, so the pieces feel good in your hand. But the quality falls apart a bit on the cut.

There are a lot of false fits ... meaning that pieces that are not meant to go together do go together "almost." But they don't come apart very easily. So the tabs get stuck and no matter how gentle we tried to be, they twisted, so the plies of cardboard pull apart. Unfortunately, by the time we found where the pieces do fit together correctly, the pieces became lumpy and bumpy. Note the few examples below.

For that reason, I doubt I'll put this puzzle together again. It's a shame because I do so like the image.

Shoreline

 

Rocky Oregon Coast

Puzzle Season - 07

Dale and I started out the year with another Charles Wysocki puzzle, A Friendly Good Day. We put this together on New Year's Day.

This is the very first Wysocki puzzle I've worked on that I did not like. It made me antsy. The illustration is great, as always. But the coloring and tone made it a nightmare for me. The overall yellow / orange tone made the pieces mush together too much for my brain.

Conversely, this was one of Dale's favorite puzzles. His color blindness was an attribute. Instead of trying to decipher what was red vs what was green, or what was purple vs what was blue, he could sort the pieces easily by tone and texture. I relied on the shapes of each piece.

It's a good reminder that we can each play to our strengths and find joy in our unique abilities.

I did enjoy picking out the pumpkins in the pumpkin patch.

Rock Island

I edited a few more photos from our trip to the Oregon coast. I'll share some over the next few days.