Jigsaw 1 AlanSzehong 0

So we decided to do something different besides the usual movie/dinner thing, thus me and sh bought a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle to complete!

Neither of us had any experience in solving 1000 pieces (Both our personal best was 250 I think haha) so we stupidly chose this nice looking one without considering the difficulty of it.

1000 pieces!

And so being the experienced jigsaw masters we were, we had a clear strategy - find the corner pieces, form the border, then work inwards from there.

I actually kept a timeline of our progress: (the times shown is the total time elapsed, not the time it took for each activity) 

15minutes: Locating all the border + corner pieces

40 minutes: After forming a part of the border, realizing we were short of a few border pieces and so have to plough through the pieces again

56 minutes: Lunch break!

See how fast sh's skilful hands are working.

@ lunch

So after lunch we continued on the border. Rather, I worked on the difficult top border which as you can see is like all blue, while SH worked on Pooh bear cos it's her favourite ><

at 1hour:45min

During this time SH also grouped all the tigger, rabbit, fence parts together. Basically, the prominent features in the puzzle.

If you haven't realized by now, the puzzle is really REALLY LONG.

2hours 22 mins - Pooh, tigger, piglet and Mr Rabbit done!

Roughly at this point we confirmed that no pieces were missing, because at first when solving the border we thought some were missing because the sky border pieces wouldn't fit.
However, by counting the length and breadth, we found that the number of pieces tallied, so it was just a matter of solving it.
It is 55 pieces long!! Madness

3:26 - All animals complete! Time for the 2 trees + sky + clouds ><

So after the main parts were done, albeit some holes here and there and everywhere, it was time to move on to ... the sky /cloud pieces.

LOOK AT IT.
WTF THEY ARE ALL THE SAME HUE

3:57 - Left tree done!

Completed the trees on the right of Rabbit.. which weren't exactly very easy cos they all look the freaking same shade of green.

4:30 - 5:40 - sorting of sky/cloud pieces by SH while I continued working on the right tree
5:26 - All tree, border, animals done! Now for the sky and clouds!

So pretty

Sorting of sky pieces.. 

Tell me this isn't ridiculous. They ALL LOOK THE SAME. It's madness.

I even took weiqin's advice and sorted them out in neat rows, according to color and shape

Putting my hand there to show you how big it is..

@ 10 hours, 36 minutes, we decided to call it a day.

Yes, it took us 5 hours to complete the animals and trees and fence and butterflies.. and another 5 to BARELY add anything to the sky/background/clouds.

The thing is it's crazy hard because there are like 500+ pieces to choose from and they all look the same. So it's like trial and error until one piece fits, you can't even identify any distinctive feature on the piece to know where it goes.
For example, we see an orange hue on one piece - but there are orange hues at like 10 different places on the puzzle. No way to tell!! Just pure trial and error!

So we had to concede - because Thursday (today) we planned to go out already and tomorrow she has to check out of her hall... so no time to work on it also!!
:(
Jigsaw 1
Alan and Szehong 0