So I don’t usually go for jigsaw puzzle projects, but the newly-ish discovered monotile seemed interesting enough to get me to make one. The hook here is that all of the pieces have the same shape, but unlike a traditional tesselation the pattern never repeats.
Just a quick score of some random recognizable art on some baltic birch.
You can really see the piece layout when you look at the reverse. I didn’t bother to remove the double-lines where the pieces butted up against each other so it overcut the edges, leading to more kerf… which is exactly what I don’t like about laser jigsaw puzzles. Oh well, this is just a goofy one-off, so I press on.
It’s not interlocking, so I think doing it inside the frame is probably the way to go to keep everything from moving around if you bump the puzzle while you’re working on it. Interesting shape.
They call it a “fedora” or “hat” tile because it’s supposed to look like a fedora. No matter how much I look, I can’t see the hat. Maybe that weird hat that Curtis in the same named comic strip used to wear (he has been wearing a baseball cap recently). But a fedora? Not seeing it.
Some sort of puzzle was my immediate thought with the new tile. It would be interesting to try to figure out some kind of simple design to put on the tiles that could be arranged in different ways – e.g., an arrangement of lines that might connect to adjacent tiles in multiple abstract ways or a design on each tile that highlights the orientation.
Have you had any luck with the “remove duplicate lines” Inkscape extension ( Remove duplicate lines - Cutlings ) for stuff like this?
So I tried it. It failed in a number of small ways that just seem like more trouble than it’s worth. I think the amount of manual work to correct for all the ways it failed is on par with manually removing path segments.
It is probabyl hard to see here but these lines are 50% opaque. If you zoom in and look you’ll see some segments are darker than others, those are where they are still overlapped. Further, zooming way in and you’ll see that the paths have been slightly moved around, things are offset that used to be perfectly snapped to each other.
EDIT: So I spent about 10 minutes manually cleaning it up and removing dupe segments, and got about 1/3 of the way through it. It goes pretty quickly. If I were going to cut this again I’d finish the job.
Yes, that is how the Cuttle file is set up. Each has its own merits.
Connected: Good for adding a design to the “puzzle”, bad for making double cuts.
Individual Pieces: Impossible to add a design image, but good for using scraps material (you can just add a few tiles to the waste area of every project)
