And so it begins: Wedding Feast (a.k.a. Beast) at Cana - Day 1

Today I started sorting the beast! 9000 pieces all together feels more like a million. I really am having trouble deciding what to sort some of the pieces into. Someone recently asked me about sorting, and this is the technique I am using on this puzzle.

First I am taking my 1000 piece bags (from the counting yesterday) and flipping every piece over. Then I sort out obvious; edge, colors, sky, architecture, outfits and faces. This leaves behind a lot of dark or random or pieces I would have to spend a lot of time hunting in the poster to figure out what the heck it is. I have decided to leave these pieces flipped over (about half of the first batch). This should work out across each bag so that in the end, I will have about 10 sections of pieces and 5 boards of lose pieces to hunt throw as I do each section when I need more pieces.

I also dont just leave my board of mixed pieces just one big pile. I always put some divided a board into about 6 to 8 sectors so that while searching, you can focus your eyes on a small sector. It helps to keep from overloading your brain and know you have searched it before moving to the next sector, I find it extremely helpful, your mileage may very.

I started sorting Wedding Feast at Cana. You can see I have 10 sorting containers and what is left is put into sectors to make it easy to look through.

Props to some OG Puzzlers

Seems the Slater family is one serious puzzling family! Thanks for the tips on glueing and tracing like sections!

They were the first to assemble the 24,000 piece life puzzle, and have assembled more large format puzzles than anyone surely has. They have some great information and techniques on their sites:

This is all about how they assembled LIFE: http://www.aegroup.com/puzzle/


I have talked about how Double Retrospect repeats and I use a previously assembled section to complete the next, well this technique is going to save me a LOT of time!

Great technique from Scott Slater on how to use another section to help complete a new section. Large puzzles have repeating sections of the puzzle. In double retrospect, there are only roughly 1000 unique pieces, they are repeated and rotated in each image.

Here is there video on mounting a large puzzle