Do you have a specific way of putting a jigsaw puzzle together?

  I like the ones of 1,000 pieces, I prefer starting with the borders first by locating the single-edged pieces that make it up. As I do that? I also group other pieces by their colors for later use, which avoids sifting through the same ones more than once.
From there, I construct as much of the border as I can and work inward, but sometimes the border cannot be fully completed before moving on to the next step, which is selecting the most prominent color scheme or visual feature(s) within the body of the puzzle.
I look for any unique feature that is only found on one or on a very few pieces. It’s painstaking, but slowly I can locate surrounding pieces by trial and error. I take special care not to be fooled by pieces that only seem to fit together but their shapes are only close to the correct ones.
Even if only two pieces fit properly, I set them aside until I find others that can be joined to them. This is true of three-piece, four-piece, five-piece, etc. groups. Eventually, many of these smaller groups fit into each other, increasingly completing more sections toward the final goal.
Not surprisingly, this entire process is something I prefer to do alone, but that’s more of a rare luxury than a common occurrence. When other people simply must be included, I usually wait until I can work on it singlehandedly, and often that requires unscrewing up what they have screwed up, mainly, incorrectly jamming pieces together that are not matches.
The utmost in patience is obviously a chief asset here, along with the tolerance of frustration over damaged, lost or missing pieces.
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