Cameron Mackereth

We started our second day of the UK Nationals (@uk_jigsaw_puzzle ) with teams! Puzzle without borders We only practiced together 2 500 pieces puzzles the night before. I'm really proud of our time ☺️ Such a wonderful time puzzling with you. Brand: @ravensburgerglobal Title: Old Father Thames 🧩:1000 🕡: 01:28:01

Now that the exciting Danish Championships @danskpuslespilsforening has just ended in Odense, I am looking forward to meeting up with puzzlers again in several events coming up in the first half if 2026. It will soon be the popular Swedish Nationals event @pusselforbundet in Gothenburg, where I will once again have @akipuzzles as a pair's partner, and will be joined by @puzzlewithemilia and @emiliappersson in our Rush Up! team. And then it is very soon on to the Belgian Nationals @speedpuzzling_belgium where I will only stay for solos and pairs (this time with @fletchonides ). In Canada I will partipate in my first 24-hour event run by @canadianjigsawpuzzle and in support of the Canadian Mental Health Association. In April it's time for another 24-hour puzzle marathon. This time the big one in La Pommeraye (France) run by @partajeu . I'll be part of a Canadian team, so come say hello if you are there! The following weekend it will be a fun 2 days at the UK Nationals @uk_jigsaw_puzzle where I will have @simon_gillettrj as a pair's partner (who was a friend before I knew that he puzzled) and we will be joined by @rulosypuzzles and @assenza.f in teams. And then it's May, and that means Munich and the incredibly exciting Speed Puzzle World Series @speedpuzzle with 6 challenging rounds. Very much looking forward to this new type of event! Then it is off to Canada again, and it's time for my own country's event at Canadian Nationals @canadianjigsawpuzzle in Georgetown. I will have a new pair's partner @great.plains.puzzler but will join again with @bencer99 and @puzzle_n_bricks in our False Fit team. Hoping to improve in all three categories from last year 😀 And then it is June, and it's only the Dutch Nationals @speedpuzzling.the.netherlands before summer begins. I will finally get to pair up with my EJJ friendly challenger @puzzle.mom and with a team that includes @puzzled_engineer and @maria_psicopuzzlera So much fun! Whew! That's enough for the first half of 2026, and I hope to meet many of you at the various events. I think the second half of the year will be quieter, but still lots of plans including Worlds and some 10-hour marathons. Stay tuned!

I did these 3 amazing @olepuzzles a few months ago and am looking forward to doing them again soon! These were all purchased at last year's WJPC in Valladolid. I loved all the images! Before trying them, I had guessed that the gradient Cross Stitch Rainbow by @llunetapuzzles would be difficult, but I quickly saw the overall pattern, and it was a very enjoyable and surprise sub-50 puzzle 😀 The second in the seasonal series by @alepuzzles was as fun as the summer one, but took me a bit longer to assemble. As with Summer Pieces I loved the various little puzzle pieces in the image, and the small sections of bright shiny colour. Colorful Breakfast turned out to be a bit more difficult than expected, but the design was super fun! The btight colours were perfect. Looking forward to new images whenever they might appear ☺️

I had a lot of fun with this 4 in 1 puzzle cube by @galisonpuzzles using images in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. Before opening the box I had assumed that it would contain 4 separate puzzle bags, and then I would pick one to assemble. But surprise! All 4 puzzles were mixed together so it looked like I was instead about to assemble a 800 piece puzzle. But surprise again! Each of the 4 mini-puzzles had a different colour on the back. So I decided to still do all 4 in one sitting, but start with a full sort based on the piece-back colour. This approach had an unintentional bonus as it forced me to start with a variation on a full sort (which I never do). In general I enjoyed the puzzle, and I really liked the images. A minor point is that Galison puzzles do not have a lot of variation in the piece-cut details, and so areas with an extended similar design (including most borders) had a lot of false fits that had to be reassembled several times to get correct. I will enjoy doing it again, and I have already mixed all the pieces back together as they were for the initial unboxing.

I had a dilemma on Monday evening. I was still in Toronto until early afternoon on Wednesday, and had some time between festivities to do a puzzle. But the only new one that I had was 'The Starry Night' 1000 pieces by @eurographics_puzzles This puzzle resulted from a gift exchange during a fun puzzling event during the holidays with Toronto and Guelph puzzlers. The dilemma was, this did NOT look like a fast puzzle, and I really wanted to finish something before flying home to Bordeaux. The only other time entered in @myspeedpuzzling was from @canadampuzzle back in 2023, and indeed it looked like it would take awhile! But it was the only puzzle available, and so I had to try 🤣 Actually the border was not too bad, neither were the moon nor the centre of most stars. Surprisingly the tall green/brown tree was also fairly ok. The town and fields started to slow down, and pick and place for this part worked better than expected. The sky was shape sort. Happily managed to finish before lunch on Wednesday, so all is good. Except for two puzzle meetups, I only did a casual Christmas puzzle during the holidays and a Rice Krispies mini puzzle gifted by @puzzlesandpalettes I'm ready to start speedpuzzling again in 2026 🧩🎉

I think my favourite trend for 2025 was unreleased puzzles for online events. The recent images for competitions by @blitz.puzzle @lespuzzlesdeblitz are both unreleased and also from French artists. Amazing! I joined last week, and did this amazing puzzle from @pimentmartin and I surprisingly also finished in 2nd place (out of 41 puzzlers). I still have two more of these unreleased French artist online events in 2026, and if there are any puzzles remaining I can definitely recommend to join. The events are livesteamed and mainly in French, but information is included in English as well. These puzzles and the great series of unreleased images from EJJ @speedpuzzle.eu were a definite highlight of the year!

This Grinch ornament puzzle from @aquarius_emi was a gift from last Christmas. I was surprised to find that it contains 300 pieces! So you can imagine how small the pieces are. It was fun to put together, but it was not a quick puzzle. Also, the piece cut makes it look like the pieces are all similar, but in fact they are NOT all the same. At the end there were at least 10 pieces of solid white, but it was still possible to clearly tell which piece went where. Check out the last picture to see just how small this 300-piece puzzle is!

I am loving the unreleased puzzles from @speedpuzzle.eu that have been used in recent EJJ events! And my favourite so far was 'Bottled Biomes' from EJJ#103, designed by fellow speedpuzzler @wiispuzzling This was an absolute pleasure to put together, with so many details to make it fun from start to finish. It was also one of my favourite EJJ events, and particularly with so many amazing puzzlers. Just check out the picture with the list of early finishers. It was so much fun to be in the same livestream as them! Also let us celebrate the incredible speed by @puzzle_kris for this puzzle!! I was also very happy to have finished 39 out of 188. And even better, I was the fastest in my age group 😀

Thanks again to Adam @canadampuzzle for the invitation to be a guest on his Puzzled & Chatty series of videos. If you are interested check out his YouTube channel, or the link in my bio. I was worried before the chat that I wouldn't have enough to talk about, so you can understand my surprise as the time flew by and I had only covered some of the topics on my list 😀 We talked about my first decision to post times on @myspeedpuzzling , joining my first virtual event with @speedpuzzle.eu , and onto the Belgian @speedpuzzling_belgium UK @uk_jigsaw_puzzle and Canadian Nationals @canadianjigsawpuzzle And also the first European Championship @mopepuzzle and of course Worlds! @worldjigsawpuzzle I didn't get around to other great events such as in Luxembourg or my first marathon event in Trier, or other virtual events, or puzzle rentals, or all of the fun events planned for 2026 🧩 But hopefully I'll see many of you in one of these events next year!

I finally got around to this 1000 piece puzzle: Cubic Gradient from Trefl. Everyone who went to the European Championship @mopepuzzle got to pick one of 4 puzzles as a gift, and I chose this image. I thought that it would be a quick assemble, and indeed I flew through the yellows, greens, blues and purple. But the entire bottom-right red/magenta section just didn't go well. Maybe a brighter light, or indeed natural light, would have helped? The pieces just all looked mostly the same. But I still enjoyed it a lot, and I really like these new Trefl pieces. Zero false fits and nice thick cardboard..

I decided that I would like to do a relaxed puzzle for a change, and happened to find this 2000-piece puzzle at my local supermarket. My thinking was that a large piece size would force some casual puzzling. I also realized that this is the first large puzzle (more than 1000 pieces) that I have done since I was a teenager! I basically went from a long period of no puzzling directly to speedpuzzling. This was a fun puzzle to do with lots of bright colours. It was an enjoyable change to sort pieces in front of the TV, and work on smaller sections one at a time. However it went a bit faster than I expected 😂 I sorted and did the border after the EJJ#100 @speedpuzzle.eu (Happy 100th!). And then did the rest of the puzzle after work the next day. Looking forward to do some more large puzzles as soon as possible!

It was great to see a puzzle from @theoccurrence.ca used in a recent Ottawa Puzzles event. I bought two puzzles from this Canadian company when I was able to return to Ontario this summer. The first puzzle (Haliburton County Road Trip) was absolutely perfect for this particular visit! My sister and I drove from Toronto to our cousin's cottage in the Haliburton area 😀 The cottage photos show why my cousins often work from there during the summer months. And the second puzzle (Free Dive) by @andreamacleodart was a beautiful image and highly enjoyable to assemble.