Samurai At Rest

The collectible minifigures have been a great source of inspiration by providing scenes for them to live in. I made a quick attempt one night to show the samurai from series 3 outside of his battle armor.

I thought it worked o.k., although my choice of colors for the table and weapon/armor racks could have been a lot better. What was really fun for me though was this kid built table for her snowboarder to relax at.

I'm sure those goblets are full of water...

Under the Helmet

In the prequel trilogy we found out that all of those clone troopers from Kamino were from the genetic material of none other than Jango Fett.

Like always, they decided it would be better to swap out the heads.

I find the decision to use a female head pretty fun. What really warms my heart though, is that the elder child expressed her preference for yellow Lego heads over the fleshies that the newer licensed sets come with.

Ready to Move Out

The empire is really getting busy and pulling old troopers out of retirement for their upcoming battle. After some retraining they all seem to be ready for duty. Well, almost...

CMF Series 4

Reports starting hitting late last week that Lego Collectible Minifigures Series 4 were hitting the west coast in Fred Meyer's. One of which happens to be pretty close to our house, so when the kids woke up Saturday morning they found this sitting on the kitchen table.

Normally new sets get tucked away in the closet until a rainy afternoon, but in this case I wanted to confirm we actually had all 16 so I knew whether to watch for any misses or not. The reason I was confirming this is the packages are unlabeled, so I spent time in the store feeling packages late Friday night to try and confirm the contents. I'm guessing I wasn't the first person to do that during the day, as the store clerks trying to restock the shelves only looked at me like I was a bit crazy, not completely off my rocker.

Luckily after 15 minutes of opening bags and assembling, we had the target of all 16, plus a few doubles that the kids were looking forward to playing with. This is one of the easiest ways to stock up on girl figures, which they particularly seem to enjoy playing with.

The kimono girl was probably their favorite, due to her pretty flower dress. It is a pretty cool print, and the fan is a first as far as I know. The kids have good taste.

And the whole crew arranged with giant cups and boxes looming in the background. All around Series 4 is a pretty good arrangement of figures that even if you were to pick randomly would be unlikely to let you down.

A Typical Farmer

Anyone have a great caption for this shot?

Fun on the Farm

We really like farms around our house, in addition to liking Lego. That made some of the farm sets from last year really hard to ignore when they were being clearanced this past winter.

The particular set we ended up with was the pig farm and tractor, along with some extra pig farmer and pig sets. Set up, and with some extra visitors on the day we built we had a modest little farm scene.

After a few days on the counter the farm became slightly more elaborate.

You'll see the ostrich was finally contained within the fenced area, and a horse moved in as well. The knight might seem a bit excessive, but with a troll just outside your farm, you need to have protection, and the little dog in the corner just can't outmatch a troll with a club. Best of all is the picnic table in case anyone get's hungry. It's not often you see one of those in a pig sty!

An Airplane

The little one spent a while one day working very diligently on a plane of her own design. I helped out by placing one or two 1x8 plates on it to provide some stability, but the bulk of the work was hers. After careful construction, an appropriate pilot was selected.

The best part of this project was that upon completion she declared it to be Daddy's plane and was for me to play with.

Furnished Rooms

One of the presents under our tree this past Christmas was the Lego pink brick box. Included in this box was a book with building ideas that included plenty of furniture. This has inspired several creations, all of which get tucked back into the pink box every time they are played with. Along with a wide range of other parts from basic bricks to swords which I was not aware were considered "girl" Lego.

It is interesting that in our house while there is such a thing as Girl Lego, there are not any that get referred to as Boy Lego. One could assume that means everything that is not Girl is Boy, but I don't think that is the case. Everything else just seems to be Lego.

Lightbox Round 1

For taking pictures of small objects, a lightbox seemed like it could be useful, and it seemed like a pretty simple project to take a stab at. The kids actually seemed pretty excited about it as well, even though they had no idea what it was before hand. Apparently the name sounds pretty exciting. The first step was to find a box. Thanks to ordering Lego sets on Amazon, that was pretty easy to find.

The one item we needed to buy was a piece of poster board for the interior. That was placed inside it as a continuous curve. After that we placed a plain white sheet around it and put a light overhead. In retrospect a thinner piece of fabric and a brighter light would have worked better, but this worked as a reasonable proof of concept.

The obvious next step was to take some test shots. The first subject chosen by the kids was this hula girl.

This shot of an AT-AT was my favorite of the shoot.

This setup also looked kind of cool when I pulled back a bit. Don't look if you don't want the magic destroyed. But it's not that magical, so I'd go ahead and look.

We used a small enough box that not everything we tried to take shots of really fit, but they were still fun to experiment with.

Maybe next time we'll get a bigger box.

Building Towards Anachronisms

What you see below is a typical early stage of a build at our house. Those are the contents of set 7571, The Fight for the Dagger freshly freed from their packaging. You might note that the minifigure parts have been divided into two sets at opposite sides of the table to ensure each young builder gets an equal share. Patiently waiting in the middle is a pile of parts for the next stage.

The build itself is a mix of chasing parts from mini MOCs that show up during the main build and moderating turns at adding pieces to the actual build, without losing too many of them to the floor. Typically at the end of, the result is something fun to play with together.

This stage of the play is distinct from the first as it starts to exercise the imagination in a different way. It is usually at this point that other parts and minifigures start making appearances to create very interesting anachronisms. It is tough to say if the white classic space guy doing a Matrix impression, Woody from Toy Story, or the jet ski with a flower growing on it is my favorite addition to this particular Prince of Persia market scene.

We also see an example that princesses are far from helpless in our house. Not only is this princess able to fly, which is obvious since she has a cape, she also wears claws for rescuing others. The box art had her waiting to be rescued by one of the other characters.

And lest anyone thinks little girls are always sweet and innocent, we see a person here who has been turned into "a scary monster guy" with a skeleton face by one daughter. In the meantime her sister decided it was quite appropriate to decapitate the poor axe guard. But what can you expect from a guy carrying two swords on his back while wielding a third?