CISRA Puzzle Competition 2012 - Solutions

4D. Fabrication

This looks a bit like puzzle 2D Danger Looms, except without the clues! As in that puzzle, the thing to do with the grid fragments is to cut them out, fold them in half along the dashed lines to make double-sided strips, and then weave them together to form crossword grids.

This time there are no word clues to help you, but the usual conventions of crossword grids apply - the numbering of squares intended for filling in clues, and the 180° rotational symmetry of the empty grids. The weaving step is a good deal trickier than in Danger Looms, because of the doubled number of strips. However, the restrictions provide just enough disambiguation to allow the construction of two separate woven grids, each with one crossword grid per side, giving four different grids.

After recording these, you can unweave the strips and reassemble them, this time exposing the previously hidden squares of each strip to reveal two different constructions, again with two crossword grids each.

At this point we have eight different crossword grids. But no words to put in them! And what about the white arrows this time? The secret here is to shade in the grid squares indicated by the arrows. If you do this, they form letter shapes, shaded as follows:

The placement of the individual strips in the weaving is indicated by the blue and red notations. Ten of the twenty strips can be woven to form the I and L grids; the other ten strips can be woven to form the S and M grids. Undoing all of the weaving and using the previously hidden squares on each strip, ten of the strips can be woven to form the E and N grids, while the other ten form the K and O grids. The notations on the squares indicate:

• First letter: the letter shape the completed grid forms.
• Number: the number of the strip in the woven grid, counting 1 to 5 either top to bottom, or left to right.
• Second letter (h or v): whether the strip runs horizontally or vertically in the given grid.

These notations match to the original pieces given on the five pages of the puzzle as follows:

There is one ambiguity in the placement of a pair of strips in one of the weavings, where the only difference is in the visible arrows, but the letter formation step allows this to be resolved - only one of the two arrangements forms sensible letters.

The large shaded letters produced are: ILSMENKO

These anagram into just one eight-letter word: MOLESKIN. Moleskin is a woven fabric (produced by fabrication!), and the solution to the puzzle.