To be quite honest with you, most of my typical interactions with jigsaw puzzles don’t involve assembling them myself. My part in the process usually starts at the raw components: wood, paper, glue, and plenty of scroll saw blades, with the bulk of MY puzzling time entailing taking BIG pieces and turning them into lots of wee little ones! Commissions are bound for your shelves, not mine, so I leave it for YOU to reverse the process! But I digress…
While chatting with three friends a few weeks ago – let’s call them “Alice”, “Betty”, and “Carla” – the topic of conversation turned to jigsaw puzzles. All of us were bonding amicably over our shared puzzling camaraderie… that is, until the discussion happened to land on the Best Approach to a fresh jigsaw on the puzzle table.
“Edge pieces,” recounted Alice of her secret. “Do the edges first and the rest will follow. You simply have to find a piece with a straight edge and line them up! The interior is easy after that.”
Betty silenced her with a stare of disbelief. “What? No, the best way is to group by colour. Start with the colour and you can easily find neighbouring pieces. If you don't sort by colour, the puzzle table is chaos!”
“Are you crazy?!” Carla looked between the two, aghast. “That takes so much time away from the actual puzzling! I pull out the whimsies, then work outward from the unique surrounding pieces – and bingo! I’m puzzling, not sorting!”
Each of my three friends stared at the other two as if their boon companions had suddenly sprouted a pair of horns, and I realized I had found myself face-to-face with three conflicting Dogmas of Jigsaw Puzzles. Each was convinced not only that hers was the Best and Most Righteous Method for Jigsaw Success, but also that her friends were in dire need of salvation from their errant ways. Such passion and devotion!
I was amazed – and just a tiny bit amused – at the dedicated and well-constructed arguments behind each of these disciplines, which I’ve taken the liberty of dubbing “Frame Building”, “Colour Swatch”, and “Whimsy Blossom”. But I had to wonder… what other jigsaw-puzzling methods might still be out there? Do they too have devoted adherents ready to spread their good word? How many more might there be to find? Could they be linked by geography? Chronology? Do techniques run in families?
So to sort out this confusion for the sake of puzzle science, I’m appealing to you: let us know your chosen discipline of jigsaw puzzling and your best arguments for it! Can we bring any new techniques to light?
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