Meet Megan McGuire, our newest apprentice. She's been with us since February and, WOW, she has been making great progress. If fact, she has come along so well I decided to give her a 1200 piece "apprentice puzzle" to cut for a San Francisco customer who orders one each year. This was a week long process. Seen below are the two halves, beautifully cut, that she was about to put together before her puzzle went off to sanding, finishing and take-apart. Congratulations Megan!!

The bottom 3 photos are of other puzzles.

“Stave Puzzles are so unique that they deserve to be included in Wikipedia and who better than this group of StavePuzzleNuts (with a little help from Stave) to create an encyclopedic article on Stave Puzzles.”

An enthusiastic PuzzleNut, Ed, headed up the project to create an entry on Stave Puzzles in the popular on-line Wikipedia encyclopedia. Other PuzzleNuts joined in and  wrote pieces of the article, added facts on the company and shared snippets of their personal puzzles.

Thanks to a lot of work by Ed, Erik, Paula and June, the Stave Puzzles Wikipedia article is now online.

  

See the article here

A billion years ago (1974), Dave Tibbetts and I started Stave Puzzles. We mushed Stave and Dave together to make Stave and because one of the definitions of 'stave' is to "break to pieces" we thought it was a natural to use 'stave as our puzzle company name, Stave Puzzles. After a couple of years Dave got bored and said he'd rather be fishing and painting, so I bought him out for a dollar and a saw. He continued to design our catalogs for many years. Over the years we have maintained our friendship and last year we started offering some of Dave's fly fishing scenes as puzzles. Last week Dave had a showing of his wonderful artwork at a local gallery. There we are below holding the two watercolors I purchased.

Saw #10 !!!! I never thought it would happen. I never thought we had room for a 10th saw. But my talented gang solved the puzzle… with a giant shoe horn, I think. Shown in photo from left to right: Jennifer, apprentice Megan, Elizabeth, Barb with Melody kneeling. What you are looking at is the ribbon cutting ceremony for Megan’s new saw. Since 1988, when we moved into our new building, we have had nine(9) saws…. that’s 20 years… so I guess it’s not surprising that we needed more flexibility, mostly because most of the cutters are on flex-time. So CONGRATULATIONS to my gang on figuring it out!

Here’s Susan as she takes time away from her licensing and marketing tasks to lend a hand writing on puzzle box labels. She also added her special touch decorating the many gifts certificates that were sent this past season.