The Big Parade

The long weekend started with building a new Lego house, trying out some new building techniques for the windows and incorporating a nice little side garden by one of our young gardeners. She also added decorative lights over the window.

After building this house, some more came down from the shelf and lined the street. Pretty quickly, in anticipation of Independence Day, a full on parade started to form, being led by a dutiful police officer.

After the horses, the necessary crew showed up as well.

Conveniently a helicopter was available to get an arial shot of the festivities and the gathered crowds.

There might not have been 76 trombones, but it still was a pretty big parade for these little people.

Round One ... FIGHT!

Two esteemed sumo wrestlers have entered the ring and are preparing to spar.

Wait, who is that there with them?

Oh no! It appears the sumo ring was actually an ice skating rink!

The biggest problem with ice skating is of course the risk of injury, often requiring a stretcher.

The above started with a sumo wrestling scene I was working on. It was then turned into a longer narrative by an imaginative child which roughly followed the above plot. Somewhere there was an attempt at building crutches that didn't work too well. I also enjoy the fact that in the Lego universe a female ice skater and a sumo wrestler have identical body compositions.

Architecture Experiments

I like to make experiments to try new architectural patterns. In my mind these are small tests to see if I think there is any chance of scaling them up to be part of a larger structure. It hasn't happened yet, but I think at least one of these has a chance. This one is an attempt to make an entrance with columns bordering it. I think some contrasting colors may work better for this style.

This second technique, as you can see, I experimented with some different color combinations. I really like the way the lime green turned out, although the other two color patterns are pretty decent as well.

Now to watch the pick a brick wall for a color of 1x1 round plates to stock up on and try to make a larger building...

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...

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.

Valentine's Day Special

Around our house, Valentine's Day (and other) cards have a tendency to be homemade. Depending on who is doing the giving, this can be due to either really enjoying making cards or not remembering to make one until late the night before and not wanting to go to the store. I won't say which category I tend to fall into...

This year though I did something a little different to go with a handwritten note for the girls. They both seemed to like them, although I think I could have improved the design a bit if I had found some proper slopes to work with.

I am a Robot

We first built the Spyrius Recon Robot (set 6889) as a lazy afternoon build.  Both girls seemed to think it was pretty cool judging by the contention over who got to play with it first.

At one point while tired of waiting for her next turn to play with it, the younger one was inspired to build her own robot.  The imagination of youth is an amazing thing.  I can't wait to see what her creations look like as she gets older.

Interplanetary Arctic Explorer

In a large box of sets purchased last summer we had a few Ice Planet 2000 sets.  Among them were some small impulse sets that had some neat white wheels for driving around on a snowy planet.  It seemed like a good idea to combine as many as we could find onto a single vehicle.  From here my helpers dug through the parts looking for interesting white pieces.

We then applied some various shades of translucent blue to give it some color.  This particular model made use of many studs and white 1x2 grates.  Coincidentally we had just stocked up on those at the Lego store before building this particular creation.

So far the explorer has been unsuccessful at finding alien life, but we are still hopeful it will find success.

A Ride on a Trailer

This entire model was built by my 5 year old daughter without any help.  The day this was built she really wanted to build a trailer to pull people around on, making use of a pulley she found in the parts bin.

It seems we were short on traditional posts to hook the tow rope to though, so she improvised with the obvious replacement of some poor guys neck.  Surprisingly this almost worked, although since he wasn't centered on the trailer, it did tend to pull to one side pretty sharply, especially if one drove it too fast.

The car itself was a bit spartan, but it seemed to have the horsepower to get the job done.

I particularly enjoyed the posing of all of the passengers.  I would imagine any trailer of that height being pulled by a rope around a guys neck is going to be a pretty wild ride.  I'm sure the steering wheel is also very important, although I have no idea what it was intended to do.

A Windmill and a Stable

The most popular builds around our house for a long time were buildings.  These would typically be either a house or a stable.  To keep it interesting I liked to experiment with different ways of building the roofs, partially inspired by the fact we were running out of slopes without dismantling the other buildings.  In this particular case I made use of the cheese slopes we filled all the holes in our first Pick-A-Brick cup with.  Not a particularly original technique I am sure, but it was my first time really making use of the piece, so I was happy with the result.

In addition to the roof, this house also has one the windmills I built.  At one point we had 5 or 6 of these around our buildings, although they seemed to fall apart quite frequently.  The base turns so it can face the wind no matter what direction it is coming from.  And of course the horses have some hay inside for their dinner.

The other thing I enjoyed about this door is the use of two headlight pieces to attach a handle, making it very easy to open the door.  You don't want your horses to be stuck inside when it's time to go out for a ride.

Candy Cane Decoration

For Christmas this year, we decided to try building a simple ornaments from scratch using Lego bricks.  The natural first choice seemed to be a candy cane since it was both fairly straightforward and we happened to have a decent supply of red and white bricks.

Building this was fairly easy, but the real question was if it would hang on the tree, since it was a bit on the heavy side.  We were able to find a branch that was able to hold it after a bit of trial and error, although there was tendency for the small end of the hook to break off fairly easily. 

I personally liked this one, but it seems to have already ended up back in the parts buckets with a week left before Christmas.