Puzzle Description:

Cotton in boll sans weevil. Always wear gloves when picking. The boll has sharp edges and your gloves will be rags before the day is done. Better the glove than the finger. The pattern on the left is twill, which helps give denim its give. Upper right is the sun, punishing for us, needful for the crop.

#1: Shae (shaekin) on Apr 28, 2009 [SPOILER]

Is the word on the side "coton"?

Found to require some guessing by jan.

I couldn't find a logical way to solve the cotton boll. It's possible that thickening it's outline with just a few pixels here and there would make it more solvable. If you choose to edit this, adding another T might help too.

Coton is the way labels read, Shae. Maybe its french or spanish?

Jan, thanks for the idea but I don't think I'll redo this one again. The solver on the page found the solution without a great deal of help. That's why I thought it was ready for publication.

The checker starts out working like a human. If that fails it starts doing trial and error. It'll make long chains of guesses, and if it hits a contradiction, backtrack and make different guesses. That works, but for a human to solve puzzles like that could take weeks.

Some puzzles where the checker needs to do backtracking can be solved by humans with other tricks, like edge logic. But I don't think this one can. The checker gives you some information, but it doesn't ensure that the puzzle is a workable one for humans.

Hi Jan, thanks for explaining. I've taken weeks with some puzzles :) I still haven't solved Special to Little Girls. I get lost when there are lots of groups of small numbers.

I need more practice making puzzles.

Unpublished by marleethom

New version published by marleethom.

I like to solve my puzzles myself before publishing them.

The new version is definitely better! I might have guessed once on the cotton boll, but it didn't feel like guessing.

FWIW, "Coton" is "cotton" in French - and maybe other languages, too, I don't know. It's quite educational having bilingual tags on everything!

Thank you Meg. I've picked up a few foreign words on labels. Sewing patterns are often multi-lingual as well as having measurements in metric/imperial. That helped some in math classes.

I do like the new version better! Thank you!

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Found to be logically solvable by jan.

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and i'm a-grinnin'

Great image and wonderful info. Very clear.

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