Display dilemmas

I recently bought another cabinet for my LPS collection, since my sets were feeling awfully cramped.  It has been wonderful having some more room for the pets to stretch their legs (so to speak), but it has left me with that strange dilemma of modern life: too many options!!

I'm trying to decide how to display my sets, and I'm finding myself doing the same thing with my LPS collection that I do when we get a new piece of furniture: fretting about where things will go, as if moving them in the future or changing the arrangement isn't even possible.  I always want things perfect, now! - and as Voltaire said, perfection can often be the enemy of 'good'.  It's funny how even the little things in life - like my LPS sets - can teach volumes about patience.

I decided to stop wringing my hands about where to put everything (so much new space - three whole shelves!!), and I started setting up the sets and rearranging.  (The extra room even allowed me to release my SeaWorld sets from their cavernous box).  

Setting up the new cabinet!

My instinct was to group sets into little "environments" - I have a few shelves dedicated to my wintry pets, as you see in the photo above...there's ample room for a color variation of the Twinkling Sledding Party pond, if I ever manage to grab one, and I love having all of the snowy, icy sets near each other.  My ultimate plan is to decorate all of my shelves with backdrops and grounds that fit their themes, so I'll find some fluffy cotton snow to put underneath the igloos, etc.

The categorization-nut in me, though, is just a tad bit distressed about separating sets from others in their assortments - so I'm not sure how I feel about having the Twinkling Sledding Party so far away from the Water Garden Kitties, for instance.  As an adult, a big part of the way in which I get to "play" with LPS, since my childhood play was gone a long time ago, has been to categorize and organize the collection.

After setting things up, I decided to look back at my collection photos from childhood, and I was a bit surprised to see that a lot of the setting up of my collection that I've been doing echoes my childhood arrangement so closely - without having looked at those pictures for reference!  I know, it's not exactly shocking - but it was really lovely to find that I had sort of "invoked" a bit of my younger self when arranging these important pieces of my childhood.  

A bit of my childhood display...

In this picture of my childhood display, you can spot the Polar Pets & Twinkling Sledding Party hanging out together in their little winter wonderland.  I laughed a bit to see that my Country Fun Pets were sharing the stage with the Hop 'n Hide Bunnies and the Swimming Ducklings - I still keep those ducks and bunnies with my Country Fun Pets rather than with their respective assortments, because they always looked so at home with the swans & other country pets, and in my childhood LPS world of stories, they were always neighbors.  Without referencing my childhood photos, I recreated most of the displays.  

It's as if 11-year-old-Sarafina, with all of her LPS tales and world-building and youthful creativity, was peeping up to remind the 30-year-old-Sarafina - an adult who lost the ability to play a long time ago and gets caught up in categories and organization - that the important part of collecting is the nostalgia and the honoring of youthful play.  Just set them up, remember their stories, and enjoy!  Don't fret!  Setting up by assortments is great and I'm sure works for many - but this is where my instincts led me, so I followed.  And now I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. ;)

At any rate, I've found that this method of creating environments works for my set-ups, but everyone is different.  How do you display your collection?