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Do you use a puzzle mat for jigsaw puzzles? Is it necessary?
I've been doing some high-ish quality wooden jigsaw puzzles, and I'm a bit worried about them getting damaged, so I'm using a puzzle mat. And...I hate it, so much. It's crazy hard to move completed sections around if you need to rearrange, which is often an issue since i always solve without looking at the image. This is the primary irritation, but it's significant, and there's also some secondary irritations like the board is just kinda annoying to deal with and it's itchy lol.
So, to people who do jigsaw puzzles, how do you protect your pieces? Do you use a puzzle mat? Something else? Just do it on a hard surface and all is fine?
(also meta-note: this is my first topic post here so I hope I've done this correctly, tell me if I haven't!)
My girlfriend uses a trifold presentation board as a base to do jigsaw puzzles on. She seems satisfied with it since it's easy to move it around. Maybe look into that if it sounds like it would fit your needs.
Ooh I like this idea. That sounds pretty protective compared to wood or metal tabletop, and also smooth. I'm gonna try this, thanks!!
hey, just wanted to come back and say I've now done ~4 or so puzzles (I go pretty fast lol) on poster board and the material is fantastic! thanks so much for the rec!
I use a felt puzzle mat for my jigsaw puzzles, mainly because I have cats who play with the pieces if I leave any lying around. The felt mat I can roll up and store my progress, which is necessary since I'm not doing any 1500-2000 piece puzzles in one sitting.
Rearranging parts on the felt is a little bit more finicky than on e.g. a wood table, but I haven't run into major issues with it, I manage to just lightly pull them sideways into place.
We tried to use one for a 3000 piece puzzle one time (mainly to store it away when we weren't doing it) and it was a real pain to manage. We've never used it for anything below number though, just easier to do it on the table.
During our pandemic lockdowns, I took up jigsaw puzzles as a way of passing the time.
I briefly tried material (felt) puzzle mats, but I didn't like them, for pretty much the same reasons as you. I saw YouTube videos even saying that we could roll up our partially completed puzzles on these felt mats, for storage - but, every time I did that, the puzzle came apart.
So, I switched to plastic mats! I had some old corflute sheets lying around, and I laid one down and did jigsaw puzzles on it. I loved it! I had one 3,000-piece puzzle, which is 115cm by 82cm when fully assembled, so I got a big sheet of corflute, about 1.5m by 1m, and assembled the puzzle on that. Because the plastic is smooth, rather than furry, it's easier to slide pieces around if you need to. And, it's easy to pick up the whole thing and move it to another place if you need to get it off a table. In fact, I stored the corflute with the partially assembled puzzle on the floor under a coffee table, and I would slide it out when I wanted to work on it.
Oh that sounds interesting! Do you have a product link you could send me? (You can DM if you want.) I'm gonna try out science fair-style poster board first, I already ordered it, but I'd be keen to give this a go too - I'm not exactly sure what to search for though.
Here's the product I'm talking about: https://corex.com.au/product-category/corflute-range/
But that's just one brand. It's a local Australian brand, but it seems that this brand has become the generic name for this product in Australia. The product is actually called "corrugated plastic". So you should do a search for "corrugated plastic" and see what comes up for you. (Because the local hardware shop I bought this from probably isn't local to you!)
ahh makes sense! great, thanks!
Yeah, I'm sorry about my previous comment. It only included a Wikipedia link about the product I was talking about, which wasn't good enough for you to be able to buy it. (In my defence, I didn't realise you were looking for shopping recommendations.)
No problem! Tbf I did try searching for corrugated plastic as you intended me to, but I wasn't quite sure if there was a specific version of it with industrial gradings or something such haha. And when I searched corflute I got....flutes LOL
Looks fine, but I have added a few topic tags to help categorize things, and moved it to ~games.tabletop where all the other jigsaw puzzle posts are. It also has more subscribers too, since a lot of people unsubbed from ~hobbies for some unknown reason.
(please label this comment as offtopic)
Thanks! And done :)