We are always adding new brands to our collection here at Completing the Puzzle! One recent addition is Playful Pastimes!
Playful Pastimes was founded by puzzle enthusiast Patty Davidson during the pandemic. Growing up, Patty would complete puzzles with her five sisters and now enjoys piecing together puzzles with her children and grandchildren. She is very passionate about giving back and has brought puzzles to people in her community through Meals on Wheels. Playful Pastimes also makes donations to many different charities with each puzzle sale.
As a life-long puzzler, Patty knows what makes a good puzzle image. Many of her puzzles feature her own original art and photography! Many of the images are a modern take on traditional puzzle images like food, animals, and cityscapes. They also offer some modern art images through their Four Point Puzzles line.
Of course, we had to give “Spring Picnic” a test run to see how amazing these puzzles are! This design features a tasty and colorful spread on a blanket, perfect to chase away the winter blues. The colors on the puzzle pieces are vibrant and the image is not pixelated at all. We love that the image has different sections in and out of focus, giving it a little extra challenge when piecing together.
Playful Pastimes rates this puzzle difficulty as “novice” and we agree. Although the image has a lot of areas with similar colors, the shading in the grass and focus areas on the blanket help this 500-piece puzzle come together more quickly than we expected. With the quality of the pieces combined with the bright image, we think this is a perfect puzzle for beginner up to expert-level level puzzlers.
The pieces themselves feature a luxurious matte finish, reducing glare on pieces when puzzling under artificial light. They are about 2mm thick making them sturdy, but easy to handle. One of our favorite features is the ability to pick up sections you are working on and move them around your puzzling area with minimal effort and no tools! The piece fit is tight enough that you can even do a puzzle pick up with one hand!
On their website, Patty says “[her] hope is to create beautiful puzzles that satisfy other avid puzzlers and lure newbies into a new pastime that keeps your mind fresh and relieves stress.” We think that Spring Picnic and her other wonderful images do exactly that! We’re looking forward to continuing to grow our collection of Playful Pastimes puzzles. What image would you like to see from them? Let us know in the comments!
If you would like to piece together a Playful Pastimes puzzle for yourself, be sure to add "Spring Picnic" to your wishlist, or join our puzzling community and enjoy 20% off your first month with the code "SPECIAL20."
