I’ve done jigsaw puzzles off and on my whole life. Over the last ten years or so, I was doing more. And, like many others, our jigsaw puzzling accelerated even more during the covid quarantine. We also fell in love with wooden jigsaw puzzles during the quarantine, another incentive for more puzzling. And, our family has been separated for the past few years, and each of us have been doing more jigsaw puzzles with the time apart.
I am an inveterate list-maker, and documenter — always (well, usually) taking pictures of finished puzzles. My lists grew longer, and I was doing nothing with the pictures except keeping them in my digital photo rolls.
Early in 2023, I was in a blogging sort of mood, setting up several different blogs on different topics (our midcentury modern house, with my invasive eradication & native plant project, a family cookbook, a family project site (Adventures in the Queue), a website for my occasional pro bono practice, a couple of others still in utero), after a significant hiatus (years) from blogging. I’ve been following Rebecca Tushnet’s wood puzzles blog, which continues to be a source of puzzling inspiration, envy, and discovery, and I thought, ah-ha, puzzle blogging! I’ll use my photos (at last) and it will be a sort of family scrapbook, of this part of our lives, at least. I set it up, started blogging, and induced my offspring to submit photos of their own completed puzzles. I went back and added in other puzzles, in a completist spirit. “Tartans of Scotland” (March 20, 2023) is official post #1. Clearly this is about control, but that’s okay; control & detail fit well with jigsaw puzzling.
I do most of the puzzles (and most of the puzzle blogging) in our family, and I do a lot of wooden, but collectively, we do a lot of non-wooden puzzles as well. Our cats (Yesi, Bastet, Zeniba and Gabi) and dog (Loki) also engage with the puzzles and accordingly have their own tags.
As a librarian, I tend to think a lot about categories and tagging, and organizing information. So I shift the metastructure (menuing & organization) of this blog periodically, play with all kinds of tagging practices, developed a controlled vocabulary (caveats apply), and enjoy tinkering with wordpress functions. (WordPress has shifted a LOT since I was blogging more regularly.)