Windowsill Cats

Artist: Steve Read
Maker and Year: “made in China”, unknown
Count: 1,000 pieces
Final size: 27 x 19″
Piece Type/Variety: Ribbon cut, one shape
Piece quality: thin and flimsy, some glare
Skin irritation: minor, able to ignore or rub off

Cheap, thin puzzle with those cheat letters on the back. I actually flipped paired pieces over a few times to check, because they’re all one knob, one hole and hard to tell sometimes if I had one in the right place. Quite a few false fits, but none that aggravated me too much- I just figured out where they were supposed to go, and continued on.

Oddest thing is that this puzzle seems to have a different name with every manufacturer. Buffalo Games has one (in the same series as Puzzler’s Desk) but it’s named ‘Grandpa’s Potting Shed’. White Mountain has the same picture on a thousand-piece puzzle, called ‘Curious Kittens.’ Surely the artist named his own picture?

Some of the small details I didn’t really notice until I was putting the puzzle together: a bird looking straight at the cat through the window, a mouse on a shelf,

photo with a guy on a motorcycle and a hanging pig figurine? Surely there’s some kind of story behind that. I like the butterfly:

And of course I had to take a photo of the two puzzles side by side on my table. It’s a bit hard to make out, that the puzzle in the picture on the left is the same as the actual puzzle on the right.

I’m trying out a new format for these posts, make the stats and details of each puzzle easier to see at a glance. As above. Assembly below: