Here is a little
history of puzzle cutter Nancy Ballhagen, aka Granny Nanny.
Nancy was born in
Fort Collins, Colorado, but moved with her parents to California
at age 2. The family lived in Los Angeles and Nancy spent all
of her school years there. She met and married her husband of
45 years while in high school. They moved to the San Gabriel Valley,
of California, and spent the next 29 years there raising their
family of 2 boys. Nancy and Keith started their own retail business
in 1968 and in 1970 went into the wood working business making
shadow boxes and decopage boards for the craft trade. From there
they branched out into the Miniature field where Keith started
a line of miniature store buildings and Nancy helped and did finishing
work on them for samples to show off Keith's buildings and the
other miniature items they crafted. Their customers were mostly
shops, and a distributer in Ohio and one in England. They also
did miniature shows all over the US for several years. Eventually
they decided they wanted a simpler life. So in 1989 they sold
their home and moved the business to the Missouri Ozarks, where
their two sons eventually followed.
Having been interested
in puzzles for many years, and noticed the lack of choices in
most stores, Nancy and Keith soon decided to open their own Jigsaw
Puzzle store on the 13 acres where their home is and where Keith's
woodshop is. So in 1991 Keith and Nancy opened their own puzzle
store in a forty foot mobil home they bought and remodeled. The
store was housed in the mobil for about 4 years. The Ballhagen's
finally decided they needed more room, so in 1995 a new puzzle
store was built. About this time their younger son Richard moved
to Missouri. Keith, always being an avid woodworker tried cutting
some wood puzzles for the fun of it and showed son Richard the
process and he was hooked and has since started his own Jigsaw
puzzle cutting puzzle business.
Nancy watched both
her husband and son, and decided this looked fun and interesting
and asked to be shown the basics of the scroll saw. From the very
first one, she was hooked on making wooden jigsaw puzzles. She
started out on a very old, small scroll saw and was soon looking
for something newer and better. When she and son Richard attended
a puzzle convention near Boston, she met a lady who had a "old
but in good condition Delta scroll saw" for sale. An appointment
was made and Nancy and Richard took a side trip to Lewiston, Maine
and purchased the saw which is a 1946 commercial Delta scroll
saw, definitely better if not newer. As of December 2003 Nancy
has retired the old Delta saw which served her well for several
years. She received a Hawk 226 scroll saw from her husband for
Christmas, and is now using it to cut her unique puzzles.
The puzzles shown
on this web page are some of the unique hand cut wooden jigsaw
puzzles Nancy makes. Most are cut from 1/4 inch Italian Poplar
plywood or 1/8 inch birch plywood. The description will tell which
is used. A very fine almost "hair thin" .008 blade is
used to cut the very unique puzzles you will see here. Nancy cuts
in a free hand style called "random" as there is no
set pattern, and some of the pieces are pretty oddley shaped.
Most of her puzzles contain "figure" pieces which are
cut from a pattern, and usually represent the theme of the puzzle,
eg. a cat shaped puzzle would have cat figure pieces, and so on.
Her puzzles are signed "GRANNY NANNY" and the date,
on the piece called a signature piece, which is a "granny
sunbonnet" No two puzzles are ever alike even if the same
picture or same shape is used. She does not do custom made puzzles.
An added note: Nancy's
husband Keith passed away in October of 2007. So as she was cutting
her puzzles in her spare time, there many be fewer cut for a while
as she has to take care of the Jigsaw Puzzle store and internet
business alone now and will not have as much time to cut puzzles.
She hopes to be able to get more cutting done in 2008 when the
routine gets back to normal. Return to Home Page