Even though it’s been almost 3 years since I last sorted 6,000 jigsaw pieces, it feels like only yesterday.  LOL  Amazingly enough, I am separating the pieces into much more detailed containers, yet it feels like it hasn’t taken me as long to sort through this section as it did the first one.  I guess because I am way more familiar with the pieces and some of the more subtle textures, I am more quickly and easily able to identify which container the piece should go into.  It really only took me about 3.5 to 4 hours or so to sort the pieces into about 15 different categories.  Here’s a quick breakdown of the various buckets:

• Dark blue, starry sky and the rings around Saturn.
• Lighthouse and house plus any sheep and green grass near them (I will resort this one more when I get to that container)
• Tiger
• Butterflies
• Mountainy parts of the skyline
• Fish
• Coral
• Blue,. underwater pieces that didn’t have a specific fish on them (I will resort this one more when I get to that container)
• Moon
• Rocks
• Other animals (horse, lizard, etc)
• Plain sky
• Hot air balloons
• Border pieces
• Birds

Of course some of these containers are still too broad in scope and will be further sorted and refined as I get to each main container, but at least this is a huge help in getting some of the smaller parts out of the way first.  Thankfully, there’s not a lot of land animals in this section, so the animal bucket should be fairly easy to knock out.

My plan this time is to do the border first, and probably the tiger so that I can check and see if my plan to build on top of section 1 is truly going to work.  Then I think I might try the moon or maybe the rings around Saturn next.  After that probably the hot air balloons will be up to bat….they should be relatively easy to complete this time as they aren’t nearly as large as the ones in Section 1.

And I’m so happy to report that there’s hardly ANY clownfish in this Section!  Woo hoo….those guys are beautiful, but a royal pain in the arse.  This section actually looks like it might be a little bit easier than the first one because there’s not as much of any one element like there was in Section 1.  The clownfish are almost nonexistent, there’s only a couple of land animals to do, and the hot air balloons are much smaller.

Can’t wait for Derek to go down for his nap today so I can start putting the border together.  Here’s a  couple of pictures from this morning before I finished sorting.