Puzzle: Hotel Lobby by Joan Steiner’s

Size: 1000 pieces
Dimensions: 69cm x 51cm
Producer:  Ceaco, #3316-5
Notes: Can you find the coffee creamer, 5 dollar bill, coin purse, and 117 other common objects that fool the eye? [Puzzle box]

Once you’ve completed this jigsaw, there’s a whole new puzzle to solve. Using everything from acorns to zippers, artist Joan Steiner has created an alternative universe where nothing is as it appears. At first glance, we see a perfectly normal scene. But look again, and that lamp turns out to be a salt shaker with an inverted coffee creamer on top. And could that cozy pot-bellied stove actually be a hand grenade? In fact, wherever we look, familiar everyday objects are masquerading as something else. The challenge is to find all the imposters. The more you look, the more you see!

“I got started doing these puzzles when I was working as a freelance magazine illustrator,” Steiner says. ” An editor challenged me to come up with some sort of puzzle of game. I had always flirted with the idea of one thing looking like another, and here was an opportunity to take it to the max and make a whole little world where everything actually was something else.

“People ask me where I get my ideas,” she adds, “and I really have to say that I don’t know. Sometimes I have a “eureka moment” when something hits me out of the blue. Driving down the road one day, I saw a cement mixer and suddenly it hit me — plastic mustard jar! Another time, w2hile cooking dinner, I noticed that the lasagna noodles looked a lot like frilly draperies; that eventually led me to construct a parior scene.

“Other times, I really have to work hard for my ideas. I spend hours and hours “shopping” going up and down the aisles of stores, and I may spend ten minutes inspecting a mousetrap or a cheese curl, turning it every which way, trying to see if it would work.” [Puzzle box]