Cobble Hill - Lodge Cat 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A cat stretched out on a blanket chest in a cabin in the snow, and every single object around it is exactly where a cat would want it to be. A painted interior, warm, and full of the kind of detail that makes a puzzle worth the hours.

What you are looking at

The cat is a brown tabby with a heavy ruff, lying along the lid of a pine blanket chest with its tail hanging over the edge and its eyes half open. Behind it a window with red and black buffalo check curtains, and beyond the glass, snow, white birch trunks, snow-loaded pines and two red cardinals on a branch. A green kerosene lantern hangs from the curtain rail.

To the right, a fieldstone wall: a mounted fish on a wooden plaque, a rack holding keys, a fishing lure and a red jacket, and a pair of wooden snowshoes leaning against the stone. To the left, a daybed made up with a striped point blanket in cream, green, red, yellow and indigo, a green cushion with a black moose on it, a folded quilt and a pair of knitted mittens. Bottom right, a woven basket of folded fabric.

What it is like to build

Start with the striped blanket. It is the best opening in the box. Four hard bands of saturated colour on cream, all running one way, with nothing else in the picture like them. It fills a large part of the left side and it goes together almost in order.

Then the window, where the snow outside is the brightest area in the whole image and the glazing bars give you a hard frame to hang it on. The cardinals are two of only three reds in the picture, so they place themselves.

The stone wall is the long middle, and the trick is to sort on the mortar, not the stones. There are dozens of rounded fieldstones in grey, tan and rust and they all look alike, but the pale mortar lines between them run in a continuous web across the wall, and a piece carrying a junction of two mortar lines is far more locatable than a piece carrying the middle of a stone.

The cat is last and it is the pleasure, because the fur is painted in clear tracts that run in known directions over the shoulders, along the flank and down the tail.

Why the Cobble Hill cut helps

Cobble Hill are Canadian, based in Victoria, British Columbia, and they cut a random cut: irregular shapes, no rows or columns, no two pieces alike. On a stone wall, which is the one region here where the picture stops distinguishing itself, the shape carries on doing so. Linen textured board, and the poster is in the box.

Specifications

A little context

The cosy interior is one of the most consistent performers in the whole category and the reason is structural rather than sentimental: a room is full of separate hard-edged objects, which makes it a comfortable build, and it reads at a distance once it is framed. The thing to check before buying one is how much of the picture is a single repeating surface. Here it is the stone wall, which is about a fifth. For a warmer, easier version of the same idea, Balls Of Fluff has no repeating region at all.

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.