Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks

Happy Pi Day 2017

Happy Pi Day! March 14, or 3/14 as Americans write it, is a day to celebrate all things mathematical. For Pi Day this year I designed a LEGO clock face using the first 12 digits of pi instead of 1-12.

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LEGO Ideas honors Women of NASA

The LEGO Ideas team has announced the results from the second 2016 review and Women of NASA project by Maia Weinstock has been selected as the next LEGO Ideas set!

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Brickvention 2017

After the flurry of activity on my blog in December for the Advent Calendars you may have wondered why I disappeared… well the reason was I took a vacation to Australia right after Christmas!

I spent New Year’s in Sydney, did lots of sightseeing, and ended up at Brickvention in Melbourne. I’ll be posting the travel photos soon on a new travel blog I’m going to be starting, and will post a link to it here when it is live so you can check those out if you want. But the photos from Brickvention are now available online, and here they are! (Click images for a bigger one, or see links at the bottom to Flickr albums.)

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Advent 2016 MOC Instructions

Throughout the first 24 days of December I had been posting about the Advent Calendar and Christmas Build-Up models. Each day I designed and built a MOC (My Own Creation) using the parts leftover after building each day’s Christmas Build-Up model, and while some of them are holiday themed, most were not. So I have created instructions if you want to build them yourself.

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Advent 2016

Another year, another set of LEGO Advent Calendars. Once more this year we have three: 60133 City Advent Calendar, 41131 Friends Advent Calendar, and 75146 Star Wars Advent Calendar. But new this year there is another option, a 24-in-1 set 40222 Christmas Build Up, so on top of the usual City, Friends, and Star Wars calendars, I was also building a Build-Up model each day, plus designing my own MOC from the leftover parts! Instructions for all the MOCs are in a separate post. As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2016 edition.

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Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Sleigh and Reindeer from Advent calendar with 8 tiny reindeer added (based on the Rudolph from the calendar build, but with black noses) and a harness of my own design.

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Kangaroo and Joey

My latest LEGO creation is a grey kangaroo with joey.

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Flat Santa

Inspired by the adorable Platecraft Snowman by Chris McVeigh I came up with this design for Santa Claus in a similar style.

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Dumpster Fire 2016

Celebrate the end (at last) of the year 2016 with this lovely ornament. Let’s hope 2017 brings us some kind of better news. Based on a Dumpster design by Bruce Lowell.

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Hillary for America logo

On November 8, 2016, Americans face a very important decision – Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for President.

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Book Review: 365 Things to Do with LEGO Bricks

365 Things to Do with LEGO Bricks is the most original and useful LEGO book for kids that I’ve seen yet. Unlike most of the DK LEGO books it is useful and interesting for all ages. In fact I would say this book is perfect for an adult who is somewhat unfamiliar with LEGO but would like to get started with building their own original creations, such as a parent or spouse/partner of a LEGO hobbyist.

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Teddy Bear (2015)

I’m afraid I haven’t built much in a while – this is my latest major model, and it is over a year old! But I never posted about it here until now. It’s a teddy bear.

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Black Lives Matter Sign

In light of the recent spate of police shooting African-Americans in the USA, I designed this LEGO sign declaring my solidarity with the victims and their loved ones.

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Book Review: Chronicles of the Force

DK Publishing has a new book on LEGO Star Wars, Chronicles of the Force. It includes an exclusive minifigure of Unkar’s Brute, one of junk trader Unkar Plutt’s thugs from The Force Awakens.

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One-wide trains by James Mathis

If you’ve been a LEGO Trains fan for as long as I have, you know the name of James Mathis very well. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he was a major player in the world of LEGO Trains, and he was one of the first AFOLs recruited by LEGO to design official sets – he designed the much-coveted LEGO Santa Fe cars (LEGO sets 10022 and 10025) which came out in 2002. But recently he has become the king of one-stud-wide trains!

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Merry Christmas 2015

I used parts from the City, Advent, and Star Wars Advent Calendars to build this little scene.

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Advent 2015

2015 was another year of three LEGO Advent Calendars: City, Friends, and Star Wars. I barely made the Day 1 deadline, posting at 11:46 PM! As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2015 edition.

Each year LEGO produces several advent calendars, featuring 24 mini-models, one for each day of December through Christmas Eve. For several years I posted these entries each day on my blog.

If you haven’t gotten your Advent calendars yet, here are some links to them on Amazon: Star Wars, City, Friends.

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LEGO Christmas Star

I designed and built this for my Christmas Tree. Instructions are included in case you want to build one too.

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BrickCon 2015

Just got back from Seattle where I attended the latest edition of BrickCon, their annual Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL) convention. I had a great time – played some games, won some free LEGO, and got a trophy (Best Sculpture) for my Teddy Bear.

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Silly experiment in head swapping: Scooby Doo & Mini-Doll

When I was building the Scooby-Doo sets, I realized that Scooby’s head/neck connection is the same as that of a mini-doll from Friends or Elves…

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Q*bert

I built a little model of the beloved 1980s video game character, Q*bert.

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Use a fry bagger to sort LEGO parts?

Use a fry bagger to put LEGO parts into Ziploc bags!

What a great idea! I saw this today on Facebook, posted by Soyary Sunthorn‎ in the AFOLs of FaceBook group. He got a fry bagger – a tool used in fast food restaurants to put french fries into the bags or other containers they are served in.

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