As puzzles continue to rise in popularity, #Puzzlegram, Instagram’s puzzle community, also continues to grow! We are sharing our top accounts to follow in a multi-part blog series. Continue reading for our third installment!
See Part One of this series here.
See Part Two of this series here.
Aly grew up puzzling with her family every Iowa winter. However, she only puzzled for fun until 2017, when a friend commented on her speed and suggested a competition. After a few events with friends, they expanded to host events in bars as the Pacific Puzzlers in April 2018. Through these events she met Tammy McLeod, who invited her to puzzle with a team for the nation's largest puzzle competition at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival. When their team came in first place and beat 240 others, they decided they wanted to travel to Spain for the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship. However, just a few months later, the worldwide pandemic shut everything and World's was postponed.
Undeterred, Tammy took all this extra downtime as an opportunity to form a team to found the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association (just so their World's team could register through an official national body). She invited Aly to join the initiative and for the last 3.5 years Aly has been working alongside Tammy, Faith, and Valerie as a Board Member/Officer of this quickly growing organization (over 1300 members now!). During that time, Aly was finally able to attend the 2022 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship and took 6th place with her team (Tammy, Yvonne, and Lindsay). In 2023 their team returned to the World Championship and even got their travel sponsored by Cobble Hill Puzzles.
Projects: A running joke on Aly's team is that she likes to help other teams beat them - she helped form a team at Saint Paul Winter Carnival 2022 that beat theirs and regularly gives out speed puzzling advice. This worked to her advantage though when she was contacted for private training sessions for a hopeful speed puzzler. She also took an interest in the USAJPA 1st Speed Run competition where she completed PuzzleTwist's Intentional Kindness puzzle over 60 times. She improved her finishing time from 1 hour 8 minutes to 26 minutes flat and held the record for a number of months. She plans to publish more Speed Run puzzle results in the near future and is keeping busy with planning for the 2024 Jigsaw Nationals.
Rachel joins us from Northern California where she is an assistant director of communications for an independent preK-12 school. When she’s not working, she’s doing a puzzle, watching her beloved San Francisco Giants, or snuggling with her cats, Buster and Posey (yes, they are named after the former Giants baseball player, and yes, they are orange and black!)Her goal in 2023 was to complete 300 puzzles and she far surpassed that with over 350 puzzles pieced together throughout the year. In the Instagram community, Rachel helps co-host the #PuzzlePrideAlong. This year the event brought in close to $1000 in donations to organizations working for LGBTQ rights. You’ll often see her smiling face and amazing puzzle pick ups in her feed between photos of colorful puzzles.
“Turtle” has been puzzling since childhood, but rediscovered her passion for puzzles after losing her Mom to early onset Alzheimers in early 2019. She joined the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association in 2020, began speed puzzling, and never looked back. She raises money for the Alzheimer’s Association in memory of her Mom every year on The Longest Day with a 24 hour puzzlethon held in June. This past year, she hosted a large raffle with the help of the puzzle community and raised over $7000.
Working in the medical field, she finds puzzling the ultimate way to de-stress at the end of the day. In addition to puzzles, her other hobbies are baking & decorating cookies, design work and snuggling with her two dogs - Stella and Charlie. Her favorite puzzles are any with bright colors, patterns, gradients or cartoon style artwork. But in all honesty, she loves all puzzles - except landscapes…
Turtle lives in upstate South Carolina and cannot wait to see everyone at Nationals in March. And hopefully in Spain for Worlds!
Ulla was born in Denmark, but immigrated to Canada as a child. She remembers getting to work on her mom’s puzzles when she was sick and home from school. She particularly remembers a really difficult photography puzzle of flamingos standing in shallow water, and wanting to stay home more days so she could finish it!
She took a step away from puzzles in young adulthood, only doing the odd puzzle over Christmas break, but got back into puzzling in 2014. Her youngest was 4 and her older daughter had just gotten her driver’s license, so as she was no longer needed as a chauffeur, she’d stay up in the evenings puzzling and waiting to make sure her daughter made it home safely.
For 5 years she only did Ravensburgers bought from our neighborhood toy store. In 2019 she bought a Cobble Hill to try and absolutely loved the random cut. At that point she decided to branch out and try more brands. In May 2020 she discovered the Instagram puzzle community and changed her Instagram name to danish_puzzler because the few people she had met in the Toronto puzzle community all remembered her for having a Danish name.
You’ll see all sorts of puzzle images on her feed as she has a very diverse taste. She particularly loves puzzles with lots of patterns or buildings. She has a large collection, with puzzles as low as 6 pieces up to 60,000 pieces!
The best part about the Instagram puzzling community is that it's open to anyone. If you love puzzles and want to connect with others over your mutual love for puzzles, you can join the fun and post pictures or videos of your puzzles too! Make sure to tag @completingthepuzzleofficial and use #completingthepuzzle in your posts so we can also see your amazing puzzling masterpieces! Happy puzzling & we hope to see you over on #Puzzlegram!