Jigsaw 12, Series 3

Despite the vagaries of my record and what appear to be those of the Blogger search function (presumably from their search expert owner, Google), I think I have established that there should be 24 jigsaws to the series and that we are now on the third series. Jigsaw 12 is the first since last Christmas, last noticed at reference 1, and is, as it happens, a close relative of its predecessor. But this year, I am not so bothered with privacy as I was last year. Not sure what has changed.

Most of the activity is to be found in the early years of psmv2 - for which see reference 2 - with some in pumpkinstrokemarrow and a sprinkling in the more recent volumes.

Assembly of this puzzle started on the afternoon of Christmas Day, with the edge, barring the two missing pieces, completed by close. 500 pieces altogether, I number I much prefer to 1,000, which takes too long, with a good mixture of textures and patterns. With the bonnet of the car, and to a lesser extent the paving below, taking the place of the extensive sky usually to be found in what used to be called chocolate box jigsaws. That is to say, tasteful scenes of country side and country folk. All very heritage and National Trust.

A regular puzzle in that four pieces met at every interior corner. You did not have the corner of one piece meeting the side of another. A simple rectangular array, like the worksheet of an Excel workbook.

Rather than moving onto distinctive islands, I moved on by pushing in from the edges, in particular, pushing in from the middle of the two sides, onto the front of the car. 

At this point the card table being used for assembly was too small, not having enough room to sort. Wondered whether it would have been worth getting the trestle table out.

By close Boxing Day, I had completed a ribbon across the middle of the jigsaw. Still no islands.

By Monday morning, down to six lakes and one loch of varying sizes. With the largest lake being a a portion of left hand bonnet. And with the loch opening to the outside world through the gap of the missing pieces. Islands of distinctive pattern didn't seem to be the thing at all. Size of table no longer a problem.

Completed late afternoon Monday, ending with two lakes of blue bonnet. By the time I got down to around 30 pieces of what seemed like a uniform blue, I resorted to sorting the pieces into type - prong, prong, prong, hole sort of thing. Most of them being prong, hole, prong, hole, arranged in a simple, regular lattice, which meant that the others were easy. The unusual piece was quickly slotted into the unusual bit of shore line, as it were. While the rest were done by trial and error, generally much quicker than trying to be clever and pick the piece out by eye.

Project for today: recovery of missing pieces.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/jigsaw-11-series-3-notice-c.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=jigsaw.