As a little harbinger of this year’s Christmas puzzle (which will come out on Christmas Day), I thought I’d highlight our past Christmas puzzles and give you a behind-the-scenes look at creating this year’s image for our 2025 I-Spy and Jigsaw.
I love taking photos of the scenes that we create. Not the Big Photo that we use for the actual puzzle – those are taken by my brother Jim, who happens to be a mighty fine “amateur” photographer with all the sweet equipment that goes with the hobby – but the more intimate photos, inside the scene.
It takes a little bit of time and forethought, getting these scenes together, but I want to show you how much fun it is!
If we work straight through creating the I-Spy scene, we can dispatch the set-up and take-down in two or three work days – if we don’t have too many other interruptions.
We’ve gotten a little smarter with our time by combining the set-up and take-down of Thanksgiving and Christmas puzzles at the same time. This saves the photographer time, too – he can pop in on his way home from work one evening, set up lighting and all the techy stuff, and take the photos in under an hour.
Over the years, we’ve collected a lot of little “extras” that you see in the scenes. These, we’ve gotten smart about, too – we box them up and label them, so we know what’s what without having to dig through things.
Once everything non-needlework is pulled out to create the “atmosphere” of the scene, Anna goes through the studio with a basket and plucks up threads, pins, needles, scissors, laying tools – anything needlework-ish that we use from day to day – to situate in the scene. She also goes through ribbon buckets and embellishment boxes, to see what can be had for the particular seasonal display.
All of this ends up being a kind of ordered chaos, as little bits get added to each scene along the way.
By the time the scenes are photo-ready, of course, everything is out all over the tables, just waiting to be re-organized and put away!
Sometimes, people pop in to visit while we’re putting our scenes together – which only adds to the fun. (We lose more candy corn that way…)
There’s something very festive about decorating these little scenes!
Once the scenes are finished and established, we take photos with our phones. We go through and count and compares with what can be seen in the photos and what is visible in the scene. Anna double checks and triple checks, adjusts placements of tiny things, and so forth, until everything is just right.
And then occasionally, I’ll sidle up to the tables and assert myself and shift something…
Finally, Anna hands me the lists and I mull over the rhyming ditty to go with each scene. To me, that’s the Most Fun Part!
I text my brother to set up a time for the photo shoot. We do that as hastily as possible for several reasons – not the least of which is the fact that my building is on a railroad track. You’d be surprised how much things shift when the trains come rumbling through!
And then, of course, who can stand this much clutter and chaos for too long? It’s hard to get other work done, until everything is cleaned up and put away!
Over the years, we’ve put together several of these puzzles. Our first one, above, was this one in 2019.
This is from 2020, when we were still in the old studio and beeswax was A Thing! (It still is!)
We took a break for a couple years, because things were too hectic in life and especially around Christmas.
But then we got back to it in 2023 with this puzzle.
A little while back, I found a few really nice pinter letter trays that I purchased. I’ve had them in the studio for a while (I wrote about one here).
This past Easter, we decided to do a vertical I-Spy, using a printer tray. The photography was much easier, and the set-up gave us a bit more scope for fun. If you take a look at the Easter one from this past spring, you’ll see how the atmosphere of the puzzle changes So Much with the different choices of spring colors and features!
This holiday season, we decided to go vertical again, and because we have two of these letter trays, we were able to use the small one for this Thanksgiving’s I Spy and the larger one for this Christmas’s puzzle – which you will see in a couple days. They were a ton of fun to put together and to photograph!
So that’s what goes into the I Spy puzzles that we put together for holidays. I hope you have just as much fun working the puzzles as we do putting them together!
Keep an eye out for our Christmas I-Spy in two days! See you then!
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