The Occurrence

 Something occurred in my tiny village recently that many people have not discovered yet. I only found out about it because of a message I got from a long-time cyber buddy who lives in Bancroft. 

Those who live here are aware of a construction project on the north side of the river that has been underway for several years now. While a couple of units have occupants the rest of the building remained empty and even had a broken window. The west end of the building now contains a puzzle factory and shop.

When I found out about this, I went to explore the shop. The puzzles are bright and beautiful, and the owner is delightful.

Brigitte Gall and Michael J Bainsbridge got this idea to create puzzles in 2018 while living through a cold snap in Haliburton. Michael is an award-winning mineral photographer so they picked out some of his photos and had their new business up and running just before the pandemic hit.  I'd call that perfect timing. He now works at the Museum of Nature so they moved in this direction and settled in Kemptville. While looking for a suitable place to set up the factory and shop they found this spot in Merrickville  at 105 West Broadway Street. 

I was lucky enough to be shown how the puzzles were made and packaged up, as they do everything right there on the premises.  The pictures, glued to their backing, are placed on a sturdy foam rubber and run through a press that exerts 7000 pounds of pressure. This compresses the foam, allowing precision steel blades to cut the picture into puzzle pieces. It only takes seconds. The pieces are then manually scooped up, bagged, and boxed. Only high-quality materials are used and a total of 150 puzzles can be produced in a day. 

The company states its goal is to appeal to fellow science nerds and like-minded art geeks. They not only have puzzles made from photos taken by Michael, but they also have some fascinating ones representing various towns. Multimedia artist, Alice Hinther has produced pieces containing a conglomeration of recognizable buildings. There are puzzles representing Perth and Westport, for instance.  Rumour has it there will be one of Merrickville soon too.

And just in case you would like to make a puzzle out of art of your own, they do that too.

The new business is called The Occurrence and they are having their grand opening on July 27. Go check it out!