Day 2

Once the practice puzzles were done, I went online in the hopes of finding a large puzzle - something in the neighborhood of 5,000 - 10,000 pieces. A puzzle that would look good on my new apartment wall. While browsing, I noticed a 24,000 piece puzzle!!! Hmmm... That got me thinking.

This puzzle is called "Life" and is the largest jigsaw puzzle ever created. The runner up (which is still a very large puzzle) is "only" 18,000 pieces. Without any concept as to how small the pieces would be or how large the puzzle actually was, I decided if I was going to do a puzzle, why not go for the world's largest? It only makes sense. :-)

So I few weeks ago when I moved, I ordered the puzzle. My apartment has a large room that I call "Piccola's Project room". (Appropriate, don't you think?) The puzzle box and all the pieces arrived about a week later. I felt like it was my birthday!! It showed up at Bob's place (which is where I used to stay), and I was VERY excited to see the box waiting for me when I drove up to pick up my things.


The puzzle weighed just about 30 lbs, and the box was pretty big as well! I had to turn it sideways to get it to fit through the front door.


I have a carpeted room and no furniture to put the pieces on. Therefore, I went to Home Depot and bought 4 panels (2 1/2' x 5 ').


I also had the rotary mat that I could use from the baby quilt project. The nice thing about these boards is that they are flat, smooth, thin/lightweight, and can easily be moved around. The bad thing is that I will have to be bent over doing the puzzle, so I will only be able to do it a little bit at a time.

The puzzle came in 4 bags.


I opened the bags and dumped the contents into the big box so all of the pieces were in one place. Then, because I could not possibly lay out all of the pieces onto my panels, I filtered through the pieces to pick what I wanted to work with. The puzzle came with a picture of what it will look like when put together. (Double click on the image for a larger image.)


I think you will agree, it looks pretty wild! Lots of color, and just about everything is in it: the solar system, birds and hot air balloons in the sky, animals on land, colorful sailboats, sharks and dolphins just under the water, fish and other sea creatures further down, the lost city of Atlantis, and coral reefs.

To figure out what pieces I'd need, and to make sure I could do it in reasonably small segments, I divided the image into 12 sections of about 2000 pieces each. I anticipate that there will be about 200-500 pieces that I'm unable to find at the first swipe for each section, but I'll be able to fill those in as I go. Given the dimensions of each 1/12 section, one panel per section would work beautifully!!! :-) So... I took another trip to Home Depot to buy 8 more panels.

Here is how I divided it up: (1) large hot air balloons, (2) small hot air balloons, (3) birds, (4) solar system, (5) first 4 sailboats, rocks, and top of water, (6) second set of sailboats and water, (7) first set of animals, (8) second set of animals, (9) dolphins and smaller fish, (10) city of Atlantis, (11) coral reefs and fish, and (12) bright fish that look like Nemo.

Today really consisted of little more than weeding through pieces and getting used to the colors. It is difficult to use the picture that came with the box, because it is so small compared to the actual size of the puzzle. But, it will be exciting every time I fit a piece together!!! I did put some of the pieces together as I pulled them from the box. The first sections I'll be working on are the birds, solar system, all sailboats, rocks, and the top of the water.

Here are a few pictures:




I like this picture (below), because it reminds me of making piles of leaves to jump in during autumn in Wisconsin. :-)


You'll see some of the same picture on 2 separate panels. For instance, some of the solar system is on one panel and some is on another. That is because I divided the image into the 12 sections. Once done, the entire solar system will not fit on one panel. The same is true for the rest. I used the picture that came in the box to know how much (horizontally) to put on each of the 12 panels - it was nicely folded in 4 equal parts. (If you look at the picture next to the sailboat pieces I put together, you can see that it's only showing 1/4 the entire puzzle.) You will also notice that this is where I divided the puzzle... ;-)

8 hrs of work and not much to show for it...yet.