Janet wrote-in to get another replacement piece for a piece that her dog Huck chewed (yup, Huck's a repeat offender), and she shared that her sister found what seems to be a good solution going forward - storage boxes from JigThings called JigSafes - anyone else tried those?
Huck chewing on a stick, not as yummy as a puzzle piece, but still satisfying:
Janet shares:
"There are seven boxes (including the bottom white box) with notched inserts that allow you to lift all the pieces out of the box at once. You could also work different sections in the boxes and lift out the finished sections in one piece.
There is an eighth box if you include the white lid to the collection but that one does not have a notched insert.
An advantage for me is that having the pieces in the nesting boxes makes it more difficult for Huck to get at them. I tend to leave them out covering up the remaining pieces on my puzzle board. Plus, the extra height of the box rims makes it hard for him to get his muzzle up over the edge of the boxes and down into the nesting box to select a delectable puzzle piece to chew.
You can also nest the boxes with the pieces in them to keep everything compact and tidy if you don't have a dog for whom wood is the favorite food group!"
These JigSafe Boxes aren't cheap at $50, and one feels one ought to be able to hack together something similar for less, but they sure are cheery - here's the official product photo:
Thanks for the reference to the site that makes the jigsafe. The site offers other interesting products and is fun to look at.
I use an 18×24″ piece of beveled glass to cover the puzzle in progress when I’m not working on it. Usually both pieces and the work in progress fit. I find it so inviting to be able to see the puzzle as we walk by it in the course of the day. The visibility invites any family member to insert a piece or more…(The table I work at is in our front hall.through which we pass whenever we come up or down stairs.)
I have a set of these purely for separating colors sometimes…usually just with bigger puzzles (got them in the Before Times…before discovering wooden puzzles…when my puzzles tended to be huge). They’re pretty sturdy for cardboard.
I can see where, if stacked, they’d be so uninteresting to most dogs/cats that puzzle pieces would probably be safe. I used to just keep my dogs out of my puzzle room and then the last two dogs wouldn’t investigate anything that hadn’t been given to them. One of my cats used to knock things off tables for the dogs to get but that was so long ago that I honestly can’t remember what interaction, if any, that cat had with puzzles. But I’ve never had a chewed piece of any kind of puzzle.
One thing for the owners of adorable Huck (yeah, you probably already know this), please make sure he isn’t swallowing pieces of sticks that he chews. I knew someone whose Standard Poodle had two surgeries for pieces of stick getting stuck in his pyloric valve causing bloat and he didn’t survive a third one. (Sorry but it’s a really serious thing.)