How do you organize when doing a jigsaw puzzle?

I do the Liberty wooden puzzles, usually the 500-piece ones, and usually paintings. The Liberty puzzles have numerous whimsies, those pieces that are shaped like something (a flower, a geometric spiral, an eagle, an 1890s woman wearing a wide skirt and carrying a parasol). The rest of the pieces are totally irregular, no innies and outies, just amorphous blobs of varying size, some of which might have a tiny little straight part that you can’t recognize as an edge until suddenly you spot where it goes.

I start by turning all the pieces right side up and then making a rough attempt to find edges. In my old conventional-puzzle days, I could complete most of the edges before proceeding, and so it was a totally different process.

Most of my second pass involves color groupings, and also sometimes texture groupings: bricks, feathers, wood, etc. I also separate all the whimsies because their locations will be somewhat easier to spot.

Then I work the individual color groupings and assemble as many subgroups as I can. From time to time I can join two groups. It’s very slow.

I should mention that I permit myself one look at the picture on the box, and then I turn it over and don’t look again.
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I shouldn’t have started to answer this tonight. It’s getting too late. Part 2 tomorrow.

First I assemble the outer edges.
Next I try to build the inside to give me an inner frame, either side to side or top to bottom. I repeat this as often as I can.
I will focus on key figures in the puzzle.
Finally, I organize all the remaining pieces together based on shape. All the four outies together, the four innies, the single outies, etc.

I usually do 1000 piece puzzles in 3 days. It is a leisure pleasure, so I am not at it longer than an hour and a half at a time.

When I start, I leave the pieces in the box initially, tilting it to one side and moving them to the other as sort of a progress indicator. I’m picking out borders and anything that, based on the picture, has a clear and fairly substantial color/picture/pattern and I will make piles of those things on the table. Then, assemble the border, and those picture elements.

The after that, it’s going through looking for smaller visual elements or trying to expand the ones I built depending on the nature of the picture. Lather, Rince, Repeat.

After reading the answers it reminded me what I tend to do first. Besides really obvious color and texture stories creating a picture, I find words tend to be easy to put together, so I do those early (right now I am doing a Coca-Cola puzzle) and this puzzle has a lot of different people on it, which is very tricky. They are all white, so all shades of pale nude with undertones pf peach, pink, or yellow, with several having blonde hair; and so, so much of those colors are so close.

@Jeruba I used to not look at the box at all, but now I do use it to help me along. Until I read your answer I had forgotten I used not look at the box.

@filmfann I think this puzzle will take me 4–5 days, it might stretch to a week. Today is day 4, it just matters how much time I get today to work on it. If my husband decides to help it will be faster. So far he has only spent about 20 minutes on it, he did 5 or 10 pieces, but he’s been very busy with work.

After the initial frame, I’ll look for colors that can only go in certain places and focus on those spots.

While looking for border pieces, I pull out pieces that are distinctive – patterns or colors or words. After finishing the border I work on the pieces I pulled out and place the groups in the approximate place they go in the puzzle until I can join them to the border. Then I just keep working on it. Eventually there’s only 50–75 pieces left and I make lines or groups of different shapes and continue solving by shape. I hate pastorals and photos of people, and love vibrant colors and distinct lines, like bubble gum balls or the inside of a country store.

I was given a 500 piece jigsaw last Christmas and have been working on it intermittently since. It is now about 80% done. I didn’t have a plan when I started but the edges came together naturally and since then I have grouped different colours together. As the puzzle progressed, I began to subdivide the colours by shape.

It is harder than I expected and I was convinced at one point that a piece was missing but it was there all along. I can’t imagine doing it without the picture and I refer to it constantly.

@flutherother A trick is the shape of the piece. When you are hunting for a piece look at the puzzle that you have partly done. Find a specific space you are interested in filling, specifically the piece you want to attach to. My mental thought is like this—I need a blue outie and part of the piece is yellow also. The blue outie is easy to skim for and sometimes there is a color change that’s unexpected, so all the blue outies should be considered.

That’s assuming your puzzle is cut up into typical puzzle shapes. Some puzzles are cut into unusual shapes and it can be much harder.

@smudges I had an M&M puzzle that was bright and I really liked it, but it had a lot of pieces the same a solid color, which made it trickier than I would have guessed.

@flutherother I’m not a jigsaw puzzle “person” but I don’t really see the point of doing one without the picture anyway.

@janbb For the surprise if I truly haven’t seen the picture at all. It’s surprising how it comes together even if I did see the photo initially.

Otherwise, for the challenge.

@JLeslie My thinking process is just like yours, and it drives me nuts when there’s an orange dot (for example) in the blue outie that I didn’t expect! LOL

My husband asked me once how on earth I found pieces so quickly, because sometimes I can literally go to the exact piece I need. All I can say is that my eyes begin scanning and as time passes, they grow more adept at finding what I need. I’ll bet the same thing happens with you.

@smudges Sometimes I get on a roll and a lot of pieces just come together, only to hit a plateau shortly after and find myself completely stuck.

My husband just said to me that he wants to clear all the stray pieces out of the puzzle and reorganize them. I stopped him from doing that just yet, but I’m getting close to that point. The puzzle is about half done I think. It’s hard to tell, because it’s so spotty. There is a huge Coke bottle through the middle of the puzzle at an angle and I’m having the hardest time with it. That bottle is only about 20% together right now. My husband is probably right that reorganizing the pieces will help get that bottle done.

^^ Yes, I reorganize now and then, but hate doing it. Then I’ll remember that, “Oh yeahhh…that piece was right over here…oh no! where’d it go?!” LOL

Outer edge
Details
Colors
Shape

I’m pretty traditional. I also do the edges first, and then I work on any brightly colored objects in the picture. From there, I will slowly get to the more difficult parts. By the way, the sky is NOT always the hardest part. And before my eyesight went downhill, I could pick out different shadings of sky color quite efficiently! I think some of the hardest parts of a nature scene can be the leaves of trees.

Also, I’m probably the odd man out, but I don’t like to take the time to lay all the pieces out. That is just too boring to go through, and I won’t do that until I have a large part of the puzzle done. Instead I just sift through the pieces in the box, and grab out what I need.

One other thing…when only hard sections are left, I will often sort pieces and lay them out by shape, but that is a last resort, as far as I am concerned.