Cobble Hill - Balls Of Fluff 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Two kittens in among the sewing things, one of them asleep with its chin on a ball of yellow wool and looking extremely pleased about it. Photographic, warm, and built out of three materials that could not be easier to tell apart.

What you are looking at

A ginger tabby kitten lies front on with its paws forward, wide awake, looking straight out. Beside it a brown tabby sits upright against a wire basket with its eyes shut and its mouth curved, one paw hooked over the rim. In the basket, a ball of butter yellow wool.

Around them: wooden thread spools wound with teal, cobalt and coral, one tied with a pink dotted ribbon, loose balls of yarn in yellow, coral and dusky pink, and a spool laid on its side. Behind everything hangs a patchwork star quilt, cream ground with eight-pointed stars in buttercup yellow, gingham blue, rose and sage, every star cut from a different print.

What it is like to build

Three materials, three piles, and they do not overlap at all. Kitten fur is warm, soft edged and runs in tracts. Yarn is a tight regular spiral of one strong colour with a visible twist to it. The quilt is flat cotton with hard straight seams. That sort takes five minutes and it is worth every second of them.

Build the quilt first. The star points give you long straight seams and hard angles, which is the only real structure in the picture, and the quilt fills the entire background. Work the seams and let the prints fill in behind them.

The kittens are the reward, and the faces are twenty minutes. Eyes, noses and the dark tabby striping are the only true darks in the whole image, so they go in almost immediately. After that, sort the fur by the direction it lies rather than by its colour: it runs one way over the shoulders and another down the chest, and at piece scale that is far more use than ginger against brown.

Why the Cobble Hill cut helps here

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut rather than a grid, so pieces are not laid out in rows and no two are alike. On soft fur, where the picture stops giving you edges, the shape carries on giving you information. Linen textured board, poster included, and the brand's own warning applies: do not try to count the pieces, a random cut does not count out neatly.

Specifications

A little context

Cats are the most reliable subject in the entire adult category and have been for as long as anyone has kept records, but not all cat puzzles build alike. A portrait against a plain ground is a fur exercise and can be a slog. A cat in a setting, like this one, borrows all its structure from the props, which is why it is a comfortable evening rather than a campaign. If you want the quilt without the kittens, Grandma's Quilts is nine of them and considerably harder.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.