Behold! A view of my cosy spot in our office/puzzle room/extra bedroom! We still have some work to do on this room, but we found this IKEA Poang chair for $20 at Value Village, so I do at least have a nice little spot to assemble a puzz.
Not shown in this picture, because I didn’t have it yet, is my new puzzle board that angles upward making for a more comfortable puzzling session and fewer neck issues. I got my puzzle board on marketplace a couple weeks ago, and I have to say that I’m really enjoying it!
I have a soft spot for these older Milton Bradley Puzzles, this is from the Croxley Line, which I don’t know too much about their different lines of puzzles. They seem to reference places in the UK, and they span many different years and decades, and some overlap. For instance, Big Ben, Kent, Croxley, York, Dorset, Oxford, not sure what it all means!
This is from the late 1970s, I have seen this logo on another puzzle online, and that was dated 1978, which tracks. I say that because of the sturdy thickness of the pieces, and the wavy cut on some of the non-interlocking pieces. Another interesting detail is the paper, it has a different finish than the Milton Bradley puzzles from the 60’s that I’ve assembled. Those had an almost waxy coating on them, whereas this one was just a nice smooth paper finish.
I realize that some people might find this a little boring, just a landscape of nothing very remarkable. But that is almost exactly what I love about it, this is before the major photo shop days, so if a tree was browning, but the others were nice and lush, or a bird took off and was mid-flight, it was a nice detail to look out for in your puzzling. It’s a moment in time and very grounded in reality, cloudy skies, browning leaves, people yawning, it’s not a perfect (read totally manipulated) image and I love it!
I particularly love this one because this place looks exactly like a hotel me and my parents stayed at in the Black Forest in 1994. I have no idea where this place was but it’s just so quintessentially German/Bavarian/Black Forest that it feels so nostalgic to me.
This little gem is 500 pieces, from the late 1970s, complete and in perfect condition!
thepuzzlesivedone 