The easiest, and often fastest way to get in touch with us is to send us an email to puzzled@stumpcraft.com.

We check this regularily Monday thru Friday and will do our best to respond to you within 1 business day.

If you are in Calgary we sell puzzles from our Workshop Gallery. You can come in during our regular hours to take a look at the puzzles and purchase the ones you like.

Our gallery store hours are Monday to Friday from 9am - 4pm.

We are located near Chinook Centre, our address is D2, 6115-3 Street SE.

Share details about your shipping policies, item returns, or customer service.StumpCraft has existing relationships with the following brick & mortar Authorized Resellers:

1. Bluerock Gallery, in Black Diamond AB

2. Frame of Mind, in Edmonton AB

3. Social Spot, in Cochrane AB

4. Artym Gallery, in Invermere BC

5. Art Junction, in Whistler BC

6. Polar Peak Books, in Fernie BC

7. Dervilia Art, in Saskatoon SK

8. The Tom Thomson Art Gallery, in Owen Sound ON

In general, StumpCraft Puzzles are more difficult than your standard ribbon cut jigsaw, especially if you have never done a wooden laser-cut puzzle before. Expect to go through a learning curve on your first go. A useful rubric for comparing a StumpCraft Puzzle to a standard ribbon cut is to expect your 1st StumpCraft solution to take twice to four times as long as you would expect given the piece count. That said, there's also the matter of how piece count itself (or puzzle size) has an impact on the overall difficulty level of a puzzle. 

First off, don't be too hard on yourself! StumpCraft Puzzles are designed to be challenging and rewarding. Striking that careful balance to maintain a flow experience is what I'm striving for during the design process. Ultimately I want to maintain peak engagement and enjoyment, while also pushing you towards that feeling of earned achievement!

In general with my puzzles, I'm using every possible tool at my disposal to make the puzzles interesting, fun, and (yes) challenging. I often end up playing with typical solving strategies and turn them on their head. So tricks in traditional puzzle solving can sometimes turn into traps...

With that out of the way, here are some basic tips:

1. Ignore the edge: as you no doubt discovered, I often hide edge pieces and corners, and also include straight edges on the inside. 

2. Find and build around unique shapes: rather than use the generic straight edge of the exterior to start the puzzle, it is generally much easier to start with a unique whimsy shape and then build around it. The easiest start in many of my puzzles is the maple leaf. The jagged edge is usually unlike any other shape in the puzzle and you can generally find the surrounding 5-6 pieces. Repeat this process with other unique whimsies and those become nodes of solution. In this way, the solution works kind of like crystal growth and eventually the clumps of nodes gradually merge together.

3. "Blocking": this is a fairly standard puzzling technique, either used to segregate pieces by colors or by shape. I use this technique extensively, constantly refining as I work through a puzzle. Beyond colour segregation, you may also be able to separate pieces by "texture" (bubbles, leaves, hair, text, etc.) or painting brush stroke style.

4. Don't use the reference image: your mileage may vary on this one but I generally don't use an image when solving. I find the image gets in the way as you end up often searching the reference image for quite some time trying to find where the piece goes within the frame, rather than using techniques like block to find the pieces that go together. This is often the habit that is hardest to break.

5. Use shape: The biggest advantage you have with my puzzles are the very unique puzzle pieces. Over time, you'll train yourself to see shapes within the negative and positive elements of the pieces. If you let your imagination come to your aid, you might be able to name certain locks or puzzle pieces (kind of like cloud watching, aka pareidolia), and then later be able to find the right piece because the location of that "giraffe" or "teapot" piece has locked in your brain.

6. Better out, then in: in some case, I'll have internal pieces, within an inner core. In those cases, you'll want to place the outer piece first and then the inner.

7. Use the Claw: over time, you'll develop a single handed and double handed "claw" technique to move clumps of pieces to another location within the puzzle. With practice, you can move bigger clumps - it's all about applying the Goldilocks amount of pressure.

More tips to come...

We would recommend adopting non-destructive methods of framing. This reflects our own preference with doing our wooden puzzles several times, and treating them as ephemeral displays of table art. That said, many prefer a more permanent wall display.

If you count yourself among the latter, we would recommend using puzzle tape to secure the back. At the time of this writing, Amazon carries two well-reviewed versions: Buffalo's Puzzle Presto, and Eurographics Smart Puzzle Glue Sheets.

To access the back of the puzzle, you'll need two firm sheets of MDF, thick cardboard or coroplast. On one sheet, carefully slide the puzzle off your table surface and place the stack back onto the table. Then with the second sheet, form a puzzle sandwich (sheets are the bread, puzzle the PB&J). Carefully flip the puzzle sandwich over and return to the table in order to access the back for taping.

Some customers have used glue to mount their puzzles, and they claim it worked well. We generally recommend the tape as a non-destructive method, just in case you ever decide to do the puzzle again. We don't recommend the "Modge Podge" method, as the weight of the wooden pieces would likely exceed the bond strength of a surface coating like one would do with a cardboard puzzle.

Once the puzzle back is secured, it is then time to bring it over to your local framer to do the rest. Speaking of which, Frame of Mind in Edmonton does great work. Check out their Facebook page to look at their handiwork.

In general we are able to replace most pieces. If you find a piece missing when your puzzle has been solved, if the dog decides that our puzzles taste better than kibble, or for any other reason just reach out to us at puzzled@stumpcraft.com. In your message to us please include an image that shows where the puzzle piece belongs in the puzzle along with any other images that will assist us in locating the missing piece.

Please note that in some instances we will charge a small fee to replace a missing piece depending on the circumstances.

If you do want to order from StumpCraft and are not in Canada, the USA, or the UK, we recommend setting up a freight forwarding account in the US. There are many good options for this but we can suggest a few:

MyUS - Reship - Stackry - Shipito

Should you still have questions about international shipping please reach out to us at puzzled@stumpcraft.com. Orders to other countries are handled through custom orders and shipping quotes. 

Your tracking number was sent to you in an email that confirmed your order has shipped. We suggest checking your spam folder for that email. If you are still unable to locate your tracking number please submit a request for your tracking number via email at puzzled@stumpcraft.com.

Gift cards are available on the StumpCraft website.

They come in denominations of $25, $50, and $100. 

We work very hard to create the highest quality puzzles featuring some of the most talented artists in Canada. ​​You can rest assured that when you purchase a StumpCraft puzzle you are getting a truly amazing puzzle that requires no discount.

We highly recommend signing up for our Puzzle Points program, which rewards you with points for purchases, referrals, reviews. These points can be redeemed for coupon codes, which are the main way we provide discounting on our puzzles.

We have paused printing custom puzzles as a result of production restrictions. We will be evaluating over the coming months but don't expect to offer custom puzzles until March 2023 at the earliest. We will update submission deadlines once we have a production schedule.

In the meantime, if you are interested in a custom puzzle you can add your name to our notification list and we will send you an email when we are ready to go.

I would like to be notified when Custom Puzzles are available.

All of our "Coming Soon" puzzles will be listed as "Sold Out" and will become available for purchase as soon as puzzle design has been completed.

Otherwise, our intent is to re-print any out-of-stock puzzles as soon as possible, although with priority given to our most recently released designs in the catalog. At a minimum, the webstore inventory will be updated on a weekly basis, on Monday mornings at 10 am Mountain Time. Any puzzle you currently can add to your cart is available for purchase and will be processed within 2 business days.

The smell is definitely part of the "charm" of all wooden puzzles like the ones we produce. The odour comes from the process of cutting the pieces with a laser engraver, which essentially vaporizes the molecules beneath the beam of light. Some of the organic molecules that are vaporized tend to stick to the sides of the puzzle pieces (that chocolate brown stain on the sides) and give the puzzle its distinct smell.

All wooden puzzles have a similar "campfire" smell, although the exact smell is dictated by the wood substrate itself. Many folks comment on enjoying the "campfire" odour but that enjoyment certainly varies on a personal level. Over time, the smell does dissipate especially if you leave the puzzle out "to breathe" for several days. Our suggestion to those with a more sensitive sense of smell would be to leave it in an open, and if possible ventilated area (garage, outdoor shed?) for a few days.