This month I set out to find you a post full of craft puzzles. That is, puzzles in the act of crafting: not puzzles made via craft or the craft of making puzzles or crafts that use pieces from puzzles.
The golden example and inspiration for this post is Studio Faro’s well-suited blog, where they have Pattern Puzzles: how does this pattern get manipulated into an article of clothing? Their Facebook page gives each puzzle without its solution, and the solutions are later posted on the blog.
The only other true example I’ve found is a dollhouse furniture kit sold as a puzzle that I stumbled across a while ago (and from what I can tell it’s less a deliberate puzzle and more a kit without instructions). Do you know any others? I would love to hear about them.
Of course, sometimes patterns are unintentionally puzzles. There was a picture of a Rei Kawakubo dress in the textbook for my college costume history class, and our instructor told us she had loved Kawakubo’s designs, and was very excited when she saw a line of home sewing patterns for them. She bought one and took it home, and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A professional costumer!
The fashion industry thrives on reverse engineering (AKA knockoffs), and pattern making in general is puzzle-like. I abandoned my bicycle seatpost bag because I was struggling with the “assemble this without painting yourself into a corner” problem and thought up my handlebar saddlebags before I solved it.
If you want to try your hand at sewn reverse engineering, Fashion Incubator has a long series of posts on reverse engineering, of which the first is simply called Shirt making tips. There’s also a single post from PrintCutSew about reverse engineering a handbag specifically, which gives great advice about mocking up your bag with paper.
That’s it for this month. If I stumble across additional crafting puzzles I’ll let you know!