First, by having categories for “in process” and “completed”, at some point, you have to edit the posts from the “in process” category and change them to “completed”. This is a big time waster. When the posts are moved from the “in process” category, you create an SEO nightmare.

You also make it more complicated for your readers.

Let’s change your thinking.

If your readers are following you chronologically through the process, they will automatically see the quilt grow. In each blog post, include a link to the previous post to show the last stage it was at before this one, and even consider creating each quilt post as an article series, listing step one, two, three, and so on within your blog post. This allows the reader to move through the evolution of the quilt without messing around with your categories or tags such as:

* Step One: The Quilt Plan on Paper
* Step Two: Finding the Fabric
* Step Three: Cutting the Fabric
* Step Four: Sewing Strips
* Step Five: Pieces the Pattern
* Step Six: Top Quilting
* Step Seven: The Final Quilt

I’d also recommend that you include a thumbnail image of the quilt at each stage, with a link to that post wrapped around the thumbnail, in addition to the list of posts in the process of constructing the quilt.

Keep your categories technique specific to help searchers find the techniques you use within each quilt, since you are teaching as well as tracking the progress of each quilt, I assume. Thus, you serve your readers and potential searchers-who-may-become-readers much better.

Let your tags be keywords that describe the processes and techniques you are using as micro-categories.

You can still have a “site map” Page which lists each project, with a link to the first and final post in the series (“Getting Started” – “Finished Quilt), and the posts in the series will hold all the interconnecting links to the evolution of the quilt. Or feature each quilt project with all of the posts in a list below the title. Just keep it simple.

I think if you treat each quilt like an article series, you will have much happier readers, and you will spend more time quilting and less time messing with your blog.

Doing it this way will help others who want to see how it is done (kinda tutorial-like) and how the project evolved. I can not get the tag link to point to where I want it to, and forget about the Page template to work with the archiving list. It seems like we took a step backwards in our tagging functionality now that there is native tagging in WP 2.3

Some blogs tag each page to the same keyword, say SEO.

They are seeing some spectacular results.