Kazza the Blank One

Quite a busy quarter.

I came across this one that had just been started on the Queen Mary 2 at the beginning of the year.  I stayed and finished the whole thing, with another dude for some of it, before lunch on New Years Day.

And now for a whole series of jigsaws from the club office cleanout.

This one had fourteen pieces missing.  I'm usually willing to put a note in the jigsaw for future users, but fourteen was a bit excessive so threw it out.

A tiny little jigsaw (under 200 pieces) I did very quickly one evening.

Life on the Farm, another single-evening jigsaw.

1933 Leyland Fire Engine

This Goosebumps one glowed in the dark.

But the glow faded very very quickly it was so old.

And then I had my appendix out.  Sitting wasn't too uncomfortable so I could do smaller jigsaws where I didn't have to stand up to lean over to reach pieces.  This also glowed in the dark but I forgot and dismantled it before it got dark.

Another few fun little ones.

Ten days after surgery I was able to face bigger jigsaws again.  Of course I started with a very tough jigsaw.  Annoyingly the pieces were badly cut.  Not only had they not all been separated properly, but the cut was so similar you could have the piece be "correct" on two sides, but still be wrong.  Very frustrating, especially with all the very similar green at the bottom and blue at the top.

Struggling on..

Finally finally finished.  If it hadn't been so horrible I may have kept it, as I'm still vaguely interested in getting a keeper jigsaw for Neuschwanstein.  Here is also where I started using Office Lens to de-keystone the photos.

Egeskov Castle, Denmark

This looks small but is actually huge.  It's labelled as a floor puzzle and each piece is about 10cm square.  It glowed in the dark too but the glow lasted for like a second before completely fading.

A couple now my brother brought over at some point.  The first is a fairly horrible one of the Grand Canyon.  The building and sky were easy enough but the whole lower half is just trees and snow.  Tough going.

And this one of Hautefort Castle, France.  That green was pretty tough.

This one has been downstairs forever.  It may have come from when we cleared out Mum's place.  It's 1500 pieces, and there's a *lot* of blue, so it was looking like it'd be quite tough.

The water and ship were (relatively) easy.

But here's where I started cheating.  The jigsaw had been cut in two, then one side was rotated 180 degrees and then both pieces were cut into 750 pieces.  Meaning identical halves.

Which you could literally put on top of each other and then it was a hundred times easier to find the next piece of sky you were looking for.

The pieces all had "twins", so once I was done with all the pieces that I could by laying them atop each other, I paired up the pieces, and then only had to "half" the jigsaw.  You'd put the piece in one side, and put its twin in the same place on the other side.

And presumably a previous owner had decided all that sky was way too hard and drew blue and red lines all over the sky with pens.  That sure did make pieces easier to find!

But they didn't know about the pieces having "twins".  And a couple of times they got it wrong.  See the pieces and far left and right just below and above centre.  They're darker blue here.

But lighter blue here.  So they had it wrong before drawing lines all over it.

Finally finshed.

This one I got from the Green Shed last time I was there.  The box said it had 6 missing pieces.  It actually had 9 missing pieces.

And another one from the Green Shed.  The pieces of this were very small, so the whole jigsaw was quite small too.

And that's that for first quarter!