Since 1999 the Ruffled Grouch has provided our local community with hand made wooden jigsaw puzzles and other wooden decorative pieces for office, home and patio that you will find delightful!  

Our limited edition items and numbered pieces are alluring and arresting. No two are exactly alike.   Our creations demand attention; inspire nostalgia for good times now bygone; bring a smile to your face and a great "hah" from your throat.  You will have a hard time finding these irresistible pieces any where else!

We use a scroll saw to create our puzzle collection from beautiful, thick curly cherry, curly maple, black walnut, or rare Birds Eye maple lumber, to name a few.  We take great care to assure the puzzle pieces feel good and smoothly slide in and out from either side.  The puzzles are freestanding:  made from thick wood, they can stand upright on your desk or in your display case, although a good bump can knock them over.  The puzzles are interlocking, meaning that you can (carefully) pick it up by one of the pieces, and the entire puzzle will remain intact.  The beautiful wood grained puzzles are carefully treated with an enriching oil finish to enhance the beauty of the piece.  Some puzzles may be brightly painted and made from thick pine. 

Our Pole People and wooden figures are cut from landscaping ties you might find in your local nursery, from pine or poplar lumber available from home improvement projects or from the wood we use for our puzzles.  We examine the wood very carefully, selecting only the pieces that best match the Grouches exacting standards.  We carefully prepare the wood to draw out its persona and enhance the wood's continuing vitality as it ages. Each piece is laid out, measured and shaped individually, before we paint and assemble the components, to transform the piece into a personality and appeal you will find irresistible.  We try to keep these figures fairly compact to facilitate out-of-season storage.  If "accessories make the outfit", they make our wood figures! There will be variations in the color or style of the accessories we use; and you are encouraged to accessorize for your locale and season.  The overall effect is a nostalgic tug to a childhood experience.  The landscaping ties give the creatures a rugged, vintage appeal that improves with age. 

We make these items ourselves.  We do not buy kits, we do not have employees.  We don't have robotics, nor do we employ mass production techniques, like stack cutting, to duplicate or produce more than one at a time.  That means there are no two exactly alike.   These quite literally are one of a kind.  On occasion we feature guest artists who share our commitment to unique, hand made, reasonably priced items of high quality.

This site features unique gifts you probably won't find anywhere else.  We make products we are proud to have as accent pieces in our own homes, as delightful and quick decorations for our offices or to give as gifts, especially to those hard to gift people, who already have everything. 

If we wouldn't buy it ourselves, we won't sell it to you.  We believe our work will please and delight you. If you are not satisfied, we want to make it right. Although we make limited edition, hand made items, we ask only a reasonable price. Because we have full time day jobs, we don’t make many of these things, and might not always have on hand what you want when you want it. If you have a special need or problem, you can reach us in several ways: 

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