Hello! My clients got me hip to shopping at 5 Below and I am obsessed. I am an avid van of “little treats” and it is the best place to do so while ballin on a budget. Over the holiday season my parents visited 5B to get a few new games for the grandkiddos. My dad also made a treat yoself purchase by getting two puzzles. Both feature the work of Van Gogh with puzzle versions of Starry Night and Sunflowers. I have always enjoyed doing puzzles and haven’t done so in a while so I was so excited when we busted Starry Night out a few weeks ago. It turned out to be a massive pain in the butt but, my god, was it satisfying when we finally put the last piece in. It’s a beauty and we plan on gluing both the puzzles so we can display them as wall art. Check it out:

This puzzle was five hundred pieces and that is the maximum of what I can do. Any more just feels like torture and I could never imaging doing a one thousand piece puzzle! This Starry Night one might as well have been one million pieces because holy cow was it difficult. Even just getting the border right proved to be a feat as there were countless pieces throughout the puzzle that fit smoothly and looked right. Upon further examination those pieces were, in fact, wrong and it was back to the drawing board. After the border was done correctly, I decided to move onto the sprawling treetop or whatever is in the left of the painting lol. This was much easier but everything afterwards was a challenge!

The next logical step after the questionable tree was the village. This is a part that I thought would come together quickly but it was a lot harder than my dad and I originally thought. Once again, pieces that did fit mislead us and we had to backtrack to get the town just right. However, when we did start expanding to the sky it had me wishing for more of the village because it was a piece of cake in comparison. The most helpful thing that we did to finish this puzzle was color coordinating the pieces and following along with the reference picture. Yes, it’s a lot of blue but all of the shades were different and went in specific areas. This allowed us to focus on one portion at a time rather than trying to find the piece we needed in a sea of other blue pieces.

Once we were down to maybe forty pieces, we organized them to their shape because you could tell at that point which shape needed to go where. The entire time we worked on this puzzle, I couldn’t help thinking to myself “wouldn’t it suck if we were missing a piece?” The answer to that question came back with a resounding YES when I realized that we were. There was one lone piece missing smack dab in the middle. My dad and I scoured the table, looked on the carpet, and shined flashlights under furniture to find it. We were out of luck. Until I moved my feet and saw that I was standing on the missing piece the whole time SMH!!! It was a glorious revelation, though, and it felt awesome to put the last piece in and admire our hard work!

Even though this puzzle was a pain in the nads, it was so much fun to complete it with my dad. Bring on Sunflowers next, baby!

What is the maximum size of puzzles you like to do? What is your favorite indoor hobby? I want to hear from all of you, so leave me a comment and let’s chat! Much love. -Sarah