 there is nothing about this image that I don't like. Hey guys! So I kind of wanted to go back to a brand that I haven't worked on in quite a while and the brand that I am talking about is Masterpieces and I do have quite a number of Masterpiece sets in my collections but the one I wanted to work on today not only does it have kind of like a fall feel to it to me but this is from a different collection and this one is from the Contours collection and this one is called America the Beautiful it is 1,000 pieces and it's 34.65 by 22.09 inches when it's completed and the artist is Art Pullin. Is that right? I hope so. But anyways Masterpiece puzzles are made out of 100% recycled board and have soy-based inks on all their puzzles and packaging and we have random cut pieces here so that's a lot of fun. Now hit the like button if you're a fan of Masterpieces and if you happen to have any sets from the Contours collection let me know down below what have your experiences been like with that. Now another thing that I really love about this particular puzzle is that this is not just your basic square rectangular shaped puzzle not not even a circle. This one is a USA shaped puzzle which again I think this is awesome I don't have anything else like this in my collection and I also love how it has three special shaped pieces. Now aside from the fact that this puzzle has those little particular intricacies to it I mean this image I'm nuts about it because we have different scenic Americana stuff going on here and I absolutely love that stuff and the reason why I wanted to do this puzzle right now as well was because it just fits the season to me. Look at all these apples here. Apples just scream fall to me and not only that as you move your eyes up towards the northeast of the United States of America you have the beautiful changing colors of the leaves. There is nothing about this image that I don't like and look there I am feeding the chickens. Again a lot of amazing farm scenery here and of course what puzzle would not have a hot air balloon or two somewhere in the background. That's just standard but let me stop oohing and eyeing about this image. In terms of completion process I'm not really sure honestly at this point how I'm going to go about sorting this. You don't really have true straight edge pieces here. That's aside from maybe the top of the US but other than that I'm not really sure once I get into this pile if I'm going to be able to differentiate these pieces. I mean maybe I will I don't know. In terms of challenge level again I don't really know. I kind of feel like again the edging is going to be a little bit more challenging for me because I'm not used to this kind of puzzle shape obviously but in terms of the image itself I don't know maybe it won't be too bad. Overall this is a pretty large puzzle so you know again it's really going to depend on how big these pieces are how much detail is going to be within the pieces. I can get through this fairly quickly it might take me ages. Who knows what I do know is I am super excited to get this image put together because I can't wait to see what it's going to look like when it's all done. So you know what enough checked let's get started on this. Alright so let's open this one up. Now this one has tape on is it all sides two of the sides so let me get my scissors and try to do this very carefully. I know I need an exact dough knife. Okay I did that one carefully. Alright that was successful. Alright let's open this up. Is this anything special? No I don't know why they put this in here. I guess to keep the back from like jumbling all around its side but maybe we can throw that away. Alright now as you can see there is no poster included with this set but you do have a nice image in the front of the box. Well we'll be fine here with this as the reference image. So let's open these up. I'm just taking a quick glimpse here. There doesn't seem to be really any tuff of dust in here which is quite nice. We'll just put this straight on the table. Oh yes now I don't want to put all my beastly force on this but in terms of the strength I mean it's good. I'm really loving this print and you can tell this is a great print because I mean just look at these petals here of these flowers. That is a very clear print it's not blurry at all and look at the wording here you can read what that says very easily and the colors are very vibrant. I mean look at these these look great. This does have some glare on it so just be aware of that but the more I feel these pieces the more I'm trying to remember what my last masterpiece puzzle was like in terms of piece thickness. I kind of feel like from what I can remember these seem quite thin to me and I don't know I think I'm gonna have to pull my old masterpiece set that I did last time and do a comparison with the caliper on the thickness of these pieces so I'm really curious as to how this is gonna hold together what is the fit gonna be like. This is also a not shaped puzzle too this is not like a perfect rectangle or a square so it's probably not gonna hold anyways but you know we'll see. Oh look at the little cows. I love this image this is gonna be so much fun you know what guys I don't want to say anything more right now let's let's just get into this one. That was a bit tricky and now that I finished this I kind of wished I did a little differently but anyways here's what I did. Now I did my best to separate the edge pieces or what I thought were the edge pieces so I'm hoping I didn't do too bad here. Next tray I put any pieces that were part of the sky and the snowy mountains. This tray was for the grassy areas and dirt paths and there's probably some trees in there as well and some bushes. Next tray had anything with baskets of food crops of flowers. This one here had pieces with any animals and people in them. Next tray had pieces with water and then the last tray here which is the biggest pile are pieces that have any details with houses or buildings or fences or anything like that so obviously it's you know that's most that's most of the image here so this was this was a bit tricky I kind of wish again that I I did this a little differently but you know what it's all good. Now I'm trying to think what I'm going to start with here obviously not the edge pieces I think that'll be a waste of time. I kind of feel like these sunflowers here are calling out to me so I'll probably just start with those since I seem to have a nice little pile here of them so yeah we'll do that I guess. So I'm sure you'll probably notice that the surface that I'm working on is different and that's because I actually started piecing this together on a new puzzle mat that was sent to me from another company but early on I ended up having to go back to my normal puzzle table surface for certain reasons but I'm going to be reviewing my overall experience with that mat in another video but anyways I realized very early on that my overall approach had to be different for this particular puzzle and that was mainly because I realized when I skimmed through the edge tray that some of those pieces probably weren't even edge pieces. The piece shapes in this set were kind of crazy and I have worked on other puzzles that have you know many random shapes to it but here I mean I was dealing with the set that didn't even have one single straight edge to it. All right so first night working on this not too bad it was quite a bit of a rough start but managed to kind of get into the groove of it get my eyes familiar with all the pieces and we are on our way. So we have most of the top of the edge done. I have some bits scattered around here as you can see I'm not really doing anything in any particular order. I got most of the water areas pretty much done because of all the pieces in the piles around me those were kind of like the easiest things for me to spot. Sunflowers are done and I have some other scattered bits around here that I literally like just started piecing together as I go through it. There's a lot of very very small detail within these pieces so it's a little bit tricky and also with the shapes of these pieces it's also making it quite a challenge as well but so far I have to say I am having a lot of fun. All right so I got a little stuck so what I did was I took the tray that was full of house pieces in it and broke it into so far one two three piles so what I did was just kind of just to make it simple and easy was I just picked any pieces from the building pile that had red on them because clearly they're going to be part of the red buildings in the image and then I also did the bright yellow and kind of like this neutral yellowy tone here as well so reason why I did those three in particular was because they stood out to me the most in this tray and sometimes you need to do that to kind of help whittle down the big pile that you have in front of you and just kind of make it easier on your eyes really. It's not perfect it's not meant to be but it should give me a little head start on getting the buildings going so let's continue. So separating into those three piles really helped me to get a good move on with a few of the main focal points in this image completed and once I got through the three little piles I decided to move on to putting together anything that had like the flowers the plants animals then at that point this all really started to come together and I just love sliding big sections around and piecing them together that stuff is just too darn satisfying and then I was really starting to see the shape of the country materialize in front of me and I found it really exciting and very pleasing to my eyes my poor eyes have been having a very rough time recently but anyways let's quickly talk about the quality here now like my last masterpiece set this did have a couple of pieces that had seen better days and thankfully the print was intact but they were a bit bent which made them stick up slightly from the puzzle even after trying to like push them down and reshape them a bit the overall fit seemed a bit on the looser side to me and I say this because there were many completed sections even small ones that I would try to pick up or move over and it would just fall apart and I remember my last masterpiece puzzle had a fantastic hold to it and I thought considering that I already felt these pieces seem to be on the thinner side when I first opened the box that maybe I should see if it had anything to do with the overall thickness of these pieces so I grabbed the calipers to investigate and the difference was so slight the contour set was just a hair thinner but the fit issue could have also just been because of the random cut shapes which I must say really made this puzzle so much fun to put together it added that little extra challenge to an image that really was already challenging to begin with because there's just so much going on all right so we got most of the buildings done now at this point so now we're down to pretty much a bit of the trickier areas which have like really fine details and also pieces with just like plants and leaves and dirt road so those shouldn't take me much longer because I mean to be honest we're really down to like the last few pieces so I don't think this is going to take me much longer I'm actually almost sad this is over because I absolutely love this puzzle but you know what I can't move on to the next puzzle sets that I want to do until I finish this so let's get this done this puzzle took me about eight and a half hours to complete this was a tough one and I think another one of the reasons is because there was no reference poster with this the image on the box really wasn't enough in the end so it was kind of hard to make out where certain pieces belonged in the image but I just loved this image so much and I absolutely loved how this puzzle took up the whole table it looked so impressive all right that was good stuff and it's funny because even with the lack of a you know a really good hold a really good fit this puzzle was just so much fun to work on the print was great the details were very clear the colors were vibrant yeah some of the pieces were damaged but you know that tends to be typical in most puzzle brands and quite honestly I didn't feel like I struggled too much with the glare now considering the shape and the lack of hold I honestly wasn't surprised when I tried to pick up this puzzle actually no I take it back when I picked it up on one side it actually held up pretty well but obviously when I laid it back down it kind of crumbled as soon as it touched the table but you know again I wasn't surprised all that means is I'm definitely gonna have to work on this image again now in terms of price this particular masterpiece contour puzzle set was $24.99 I believe about $25 which is you know tends to be on the higher end for me but this was a gift from my hubby so you know that's okay but considering the price and the fact that the fit in the hold wasn't all there I still kind of feel like it was worth it because once it was fully completed this had to have been one of the most beautiful looking puzzles I've ever seen I actually left it sat on my table for a few days after I finished it just so that I can stare at it whenever I you know passed by all the details that were in the images there were just so many beautiful areas in this image it was something that if I had enough glue I would have probably you know glued it together and just put it on display somewhere but to be quite honest I don't really have anywhere else in my house where I can put it so you know there's that and what was also great about this set was that not only did you have some of the more you know traditional pieces the ones that you normally see in other puzzle sets it also had a ton of other crazy shapes in there as well which definitely added to the whole overall experience and challenge of this puzzle this was it was so much fun I absolutely loved this experience and it's definitely something that I would work on again I would never I would probably never donate it because I just love it so much it's definitely one to stay on my on my puzzle shelf collection now if any of you have tried any of masterpieces contour puzzle sets please let me know down below which sets you tried and what was your experience like because if there's other contour sets out there for masterpieces I I kind of want to try them out and see what they're like quite honestly I don't know which what other set can possibly top the one that I just did because I I love it so much and let me know down below as well if there are any other collections or series for masterpieces that you'd like to see me try out for my first experience of doing a non-traditionally shaped puzzle if that makes sense or you know just square rectangle puzzle I could have just said that this was a fantastic first experience it's definitely something that I can see myself doing again and I know masterpieces is not one of those brands that people tend to favor most but I don't know I kind of feel like with my experiences that I've had with the brand so far even though the fit and hold and you know there's damage issues or whatever even though there's those negatives I don't know I kind of feel like there's something special about them I don't know maybe I got kind of have a thing for masterpieces I don't hate it I actually have enjoyed both of my experiences and I don't know I have a few more sets in my collection that I need to try out but so far in terms of like the fun level it's definitely got me with that but anyways guys if you'd like to share your own puzzling experiences with other puzzlers and myself I do have a puzzling community that you can join and I'm gonna leave a link down below that will direct you to that video and be sure that you're subscribed if you like to hear what I have to say about other puzzle sets and brands but anyways guys I have to catch up on my puzzle to-do list that keeps growing so I hope you're all doing well thank you all for watching and I will see you in the next one