Cobble Hill - Squirrels At Home 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Nine photographs of a red squirrel keeping house, and it turns out he has a fully equipped workshop. A three by three grid, which makes this one of the friendlier 1000 piece puzzles we carry.

What you are looking at

Nine separate photographs, each a real squirrel posed in a miniature room. Top row: sitting in a bathtub with a rubber duck and a bar of soap; folding laundry under a stitched sampler reading there's no place like home; ironing at a laundry sink in a check apron with a wicker basket at his feet. Middle row: pulling a little red wagon of pumpkins along a picket fence; standing at a kitchen counter with a stove, a rolling pin and shelves of jars; sitting at a stone fireplace with a basket of logs. Bottom row: at a desk with a laptop and an anglepoise lamp; in a workshop with a red tool chest, a pegboard of spanners and a motorbike; and outside with a rake in the autumn leaves.

What it is like to build

Build the lattice and you turn one puzzle into nine. The cream border between the frames is pale, straight edged and unmistakable, and it runs right through the picture. Do it first. When it is in you have nine holes of about a hundred pieces each, and this becomes a puzzle you can genuinely do in nine sittings.

Sorting by panel is unusually easy here because every room has its own colour. The bathroom is pale blue, the laundry is teal check, the kitchen is warm wood and cream, the fireplace panel is grey stone, the workshop is red and steel, and the two outdoor panels are green and autumn gold. Very little of it is ambiguous.

Within a panel, the squirrel is the last thing you do. The rooms are made of hard edged props with clear outlines, so they go together fast. The animal is soft brown fur against a busy background, and it is the only genuinely fiddly part of any panel. Fur first by direction, then by shade.

Why Cobble Hill

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut, so the pieces are irregular and no two are alike. That matters more on a grid image than on most, because the nine borders are near identical strips of cream and it is the piece shape rather than the picture that keeps them apart. Linen textured board, poster in the box.

Specifications

A little context

The multi-panel format is worth understanding as a category rather than as a picture style, because it changes the whole shape of the experience. A single scene has to be built more or less in one campaign. A grid can be put down and picked up, panel by panel, without losing your place, which makes it the format to reach for if your puzzling happens in half hours rather than evenings. The other one in stock is Gardener's Calendar, twelve Art Nouveau panels instead of nine photographs.

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.