Possibly one of the most recognizable names in the jigsaw puzzle world today is Tammy McLeod. She holds two Guinness World Records for speed puzzling, is one of the founding members of the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association, has her own YouTube channel, and has done a collaboration with wildly popular YouTuber Mark Rober (he has more than 70M subscribers and is best known for engineering a glitter bomb package to teach a lesson to package thieves).
Tammy is also an incredibly warm and welcoming face at puzzle events and she’s easy to spot with her bright and bold puzzle clothing and accessories.
Joyce (@joyce.puzzles) had a chance to chat with Tammy about her love of puzzles, speed puzzling, and other hobbies such as completing escape rooms. Read on to learn more about the multi-talented Tammy McLeod!
You can also watch the full video interview on YouTube.
(Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
I puzzled when I was a kid, but at the level that everybody puzzles - once a year the family spends a few days working on one. When I went off to college, I bought two or three and had a small collection. Then even after I graduated college, my collection stayed about that size.
It wasn't until I started speed puzzling that I started accumulating a lot more puzzles and spending entire days practicing. I don't think I started doing that ‘til about six years ago.
The documentary Wicker Kittens. I caught it by accident and learned that there's this whole world of puzzling out there.
I wanted to attend the competition from Wicker Kittens because I hadn't heard of anything in my area. So I started trying to find people who would go there with me. I kept searching, trying to find casual puzzling groups. I found one that met once a month, two hours away from me. I said, “Hey, I'm a single puzzler, put me in with someone else who needs a partner.” There were multiple rounds and I won my round.
Then the organizer got me in contact with Aly Krasny after that, and that started the ball rolling, and we eventually got a team and went to St. Paul and things started growing from there.
I had come across a website for the World Jigsaw Puzzle Federation and they had this page of rules on how to be part of the federation. That gave me a framework to work with. I figured I’d try and find other people in the United States, because on the website it said that to participate in the World Championship you have to have a country level organization representing you.
So I started trolling Facebook groups like, “There should be a U.S. championship, there should be U.S. club. Are you interested? Will you join me?” I slowly gathered a bunch of people and we got the USA JPA (Jigsaw Puzzle Association) to become an official organization in May of 2020.
Valerie, I met at the St. Paul competition in January of 2020 in person. Faith, I found her in a Facebook group. And Jonathan was organizing speed puzzling virtual competitions, so he was a natural fit as well.
Well, somehow I've accidentally become more of a jigsaw influencer. I've been doing a lot of social media. I've also started doing a lot more escape room stuff. I started writing some reviews. I’m working on this huge project where we put together an attempt at a world record again, so that took a lot of effort. I've been wanting to start doing some writing, but I have so many projects competing for my attention. I'm busier than when I was actually working.
Well, one is officially recognized, the other one was an event at the World Championship last year. It was organized by WJPF, so it's kind of an official thing, but I don't know what happened between getting it to show up on the Guinness website. But the team broke the record that day.
The first one was in December of 2020 during the pandemic. It was quite an endeavor getting seven people who were unrelated to be the same place to get this record attempt officiated. I needed two independent witnesses, a photographer, a videographer, two timekeepers. We all stayed very far apart and masked and somehow I pulled it off, followed the guidelines and everybody stayed safe.
I know other puzzlers trying to make an attempt at breaking my record, which I totally support because I've had a chance to hold it for a few years now. Guinness sent me a certificate, I framed it and put it on my wall, and they're not taking that away from me. It was cool to have done it once and a lot of very fast puzzlers are coming outta the woodwork so it's great to see, especially younger people, they have faster reflexes, better eyesight, their brains just move faster.
I've always been interested in everything that's even tangentially related to puzzles. So I think having this channel gives me a more structured way of approaching these things. Like, I bought a new puzzle. I can review it, I can film myself doing it, I can share that knowledge that I gained from trying this new brand with people. So it gives me a more of a secondary motivation. 'Cause I could just do all the puzzles in the world and then they fade of into my past.
But this gives me a way to capture that and now I have this body of work in a sense. So I don't feel like I have a focus. If it's puzzle related, I think it's appropriate for me because it follows my passions and my interests.
At one point, I was hoping to start learning how to make wooden jigsaw puzzles. I bought a scroll saw. But getting good at that needs time. It's a very physical practice, and you need to spend time just working on the dexterity and the motions. That's something I might like to get good at in the future.
In that same vein, I think it'll be really cool to design puzzles - not like, standard thousand piece, some pretty image - I want to do interesting things with puzzles.
Something where the cut is different and you can move things around. There are a lot of mystery puzzles now coming out in that genre. More like, escape jigsaw puzzles. The combined genre is still growing and improving as I've seen new products that do it differently all the time, and that's a really fun one to be in, I think.
In fact, just this year's Nationals was my first time competing and I was able to spend more time socializing with people, meeting puzzlers. Portland Jigsaw Masters was great because it was a more low key competition. I got to spend a lot more time just hanging out and meeting other puzzlers, getting to know people I didn't know very well before. I felt like I was competing 30% and 70% was social, so it was really nice.
To date, I think I'm closing in on 700. I just did 33 this week, 34, so I need to update my count. Then I did five in Portland, I think, in two days. Recently, my team did an attempt at the world record of the most escape rooms attended in 24 hours, and we attended 34.
It's one of the things I do wherever I'm traveling for something. I will also see if there’s a few hours I can carve out and find the best escape rooms in the area and just visit them. Some trips I may do one, some trips I may do six, and it really depends. But I almost always try to do one.
I'm very willing to do them by myself. Usually it means I probably have to pay for two tickets because it doesn't make it sense to open just for one person. And I usually will email them and say, “Hey, I'm traveling by myself. I don't have a team. Is your room, is it possible to do your room with just one person?” Because sometimes there's a puzzle that might need buttons pressed on opposite sides of the room. For that kind of thing, they would say, “Alright, we will send a game master in to be your puppet. You tell 'em what to do.”
One of my favorites right now is in Amsterdam. I did it on a layover on the way to Worlds, I think. An amazing escape room that was… just the technology that they decided they wanted to try and achieve, no sane designer really would've done that, but they did it and it was really good. Then there's one which is on a boat. There’s one section of the game where they simulate the boat flooding and water just starts pouring in and you have to climb. It was so fun because you get to play act for a little while. They made it quite believable.
There are some as a speed puzzle, I'm not discriminating because it's just a race. But if I had to choose stuff for myself, I tend to gravitate towards very colorful things or even lot of gradients. I also love wooden puzzles because a lot of wooden puzzles have secondary mystery elements to it. Like, you can get pieces and rearrange it to something.
I like some that pertain to my other hobbies, like sewing puzzles, for example. I actually have a small collection of puzzles that have sewing elements in it, like a sewing room or one where it is just sewing tools and threads and buttons all over the place.
My philosophy with that is, I'm spending a lot of time looking on at this picture and working with it. I would like it to engender thoughts to me that I would be having anyway. Thinking about hobbies, seeing pretty colors.
I think one of the biggest things I've learned over the last few years puzzling is that there's no wrong way to puzzle. Everybody loves puzzles and sometimes I feel like people say, “Oh, you shouldn't speed puzzle, that spoils the fun of it,” or “You should speed puzzle because that's the only exciting way to do it.” But we all love puzzles and really, there is no wrong way. It's your entertainment. Approach it how you will. And I think that binds us all together as puzzlers.
