For one week, you can receive a discount of up to 20% off orders placed at The Brick Collectors BrickLink Store. The details are on the coupon below - click to expand. Offer expires 3/6/12.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Visitor Appreciation Sale
I appreciate all of you who stop by and visit my blog and really appreciate the comments & encouraging words from many of you. As a way of saying thanks, I'm making a special offer available to my blog visitors. This deal only lasts a week, however, so if you'd like to take advantage of it, act now!
For one week, you can receive a discount of up to 20% off orders placed at The Brick Collectors BrickLink Store. The details are on the coupon below - click to expand. Offer expires 3/6/12.
For one week, you can receive a discount of up to 20% off orders placed at The Brick Collectors BrickLink Store. The details are on the coupon below - click to expand. Offer expires 3/6/12.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Building Challenge #7
We're back in action with this week's Building Challenge! We post a new challenge every Friday and we welcome YOU to play along with us.
Building Challenge #7 - Micro Medieval
We're going back to some small-scale building (mostly because it doesn't take too long!). This week we challenged ourselves to build something in the castle/medieval theme in microscale. I'll share my inspiration model first this week - the Medieval Mountain Fortress.
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| Medieval Mountain Fortress Front View - by LEGOMom |
I'm pretty happy with the way the drawbridge came out. And I like the banners on the front and side.
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| Drawbridge View |
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| Wide shot |
The gray rocky base is a LEGO element - it came in a Coast Guard-type set, if I remember correctly.
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| Back View |
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| Aerial View |
Next we have LEGOBoy, with his Saxon Castle.
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| Saxon Castle by LEGOBoy |
This is the sort of early castle that the Saxon people built after the Norman soldiers conquered their territory. (Source: LEGOBoy)
There's a moat running around it and a stockade wall. The building with the yellow straw roof is the bailey. In the far corner is the lookout tower.
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| Lookout Tower |
If you have a model you'd like to share, link up to us below. Thanks for checking in with us!
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
One of My Favorite Things
Being an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) has its pros and cons. On the positive side, you have your own money and can buy whatever LEGOs you want, whenever you want. This assumes you have an understanding spouse or significant other ;) On the negative side, you end up with a whole lot of LEGOs, and you have to keep them somewhere.
I don't know if all AFOLs are neurotic or not, but I think it probably helps. I can't imagine keeping our LEGOs in one monstrous, disorganized pile. No, they must be sorted. Some other time I might share pictures of what our LEGO room looks like. (Yes, it's a room. Sort of.)
For now, I'll share with you a product we found and love. (I have no affiliation with this product or company. I'm just a happy customer!) We used to keep our minifigs in plastic bags sorted by theme. It looked like this:
It did the job. But those minifigs are just so darn cute, and it isn't much fun to look at them this way (and also not so easy to find that one character you're looking for). Another one of my hobbies is scrapbooking, and that's how I found....the Scraponizer!
Scraponizers are these amazing 8.5" by 11" plastic cases. You can get them with divided trays inside, like the one you see below.
The great part about these is that you can see everyone in there very easily, the Scraponizers are easy to stack on a shelf, and on the spine you can label them by theme. Makes it super easy to find even one lowly mime amidst two dozen Crusaders. (Not that the mime would be mixed in with the Crusaders. *Shudder*.)
This certainly isn't the cheapest way to sort minifigs (especially when you have a ton), but it's very satisfying. Searching around online I found a place to get them for about $4 apiece. Warning: If you try them, you may very well become addicted. Especially if you are the sort of person who would never store a mime with Crusaders.
These cases are also child-friendly. Our 7-year-old is able to look through the stack of Scraponizers and find exactly what he wants, instead of pestering us to find it for him. We're still working on training him to put things away himself...
If you visit the Scraponizer website and look at their photo gallery you'll see pictures of them being used to store small LEGO collections. And before we wrap this up, just a friendly reminder that we'll be back with Building Challenge #7 on Friday, so be sure to visit us then!
I don't know if all AFOLs are neurotic or not, but I think it probably helps. I can't imagine keeping our LEGOs in one monstrous, disorganized pile. No, they must be sorted. Some other time I might share pictures of what our LEGO room looks like. (Yes, it's a room. Sort of.)
For now, I'll share with you a product we found and love. (I have no affiliation with this product or company. I'm just a happy customer!) We used to keep our minifigs in plastic bags sorted by theme. It looked like this:
It did the job. But those minifigs are just so darn cute, and it isn't much fun to look at them this way (and also not so easy to find that one character you're looking for). Another one of my hobbies is scrapbooking, and that's how I found....the Scraponizer!
Scraponizers are these amazing 8.5" by 11" plastic cases. You can get them with divided trays inside, like the one you see below.
The great part about these is that you can see everyone in there very easily, the Scraponizers are easy to stack on a shelf, and on the spine you can label them by theme. Makes it super easy to find even one lowly mime amidst two dozen Crusaders. (Not that the mime would be mixed in with the Crusaders. *Shudder*.)
This certainly isn't the cheapest way to sort minifigs (especially when you have a ton), but it's very satisfying. Searching around online I found a place to get them for about $4 apiece. Warning: If you try them, you may very well become addicted. Especially if you are the sort of person who would never store a mime with Crusaders.
These cases are also child-friendly. Our 7-year-old is able to look through the stack of Scraponizers and find exactly what he wants, instead of pestering us to find it for him. We're still working on training him to put things away himself...
If you visit the Scraponizer website and look at their photo gallery you'll see pictures of them being used to store small LEGO collections. And before we wrap this up, just a friendly reminder that we'll be back with Building Challenge #7 on Friday, so be sure to visit us then!
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Family Fun
Today we share a little building challenge history with you. Before we began this blog, my family and I had another way of doing LEGO building challenges. One of us would create bags of blocks, like this one:
Each person would receive a bag with an identical set of pieces. This bag contained these pieces:
Then each of us would build a model using all the pieces. We used tall books (think Where's Waldo) to shield our creations from each other until we were ready to reveal them. The result is different creations that use the exact same pieces. Here's what LEGOBoy and I (LEGOMom) made for this challenge:
Here are the models we created from a different set of challenge pieces:
Monday, February 20, 2012
New Website
Since we don't have a challenge to share this week, I thought we'd keep you busy with some other interesting LEGO-related posts.
First up, I am proud to introduce you to a new website featuring stop-motion LEGO movies and other LEGO creations...Brick a Brack Studios! This website features the work of one of the third place winners in the LEGO Super Heroes Unite contest that ended this past December. If you click on this link, you can view his winning entry - Our LEGO Batman Adventure Part 1. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that this is the work of the same person I refer to here as LEGODad - my multi-talented husband, Larry.
Check out the free trailers and if you like what you see, consider becoming a member. For as little as $1 a month you will have access to exclusive content, tutorials, forums, and more. And if you'd like to start making LEGO movies yourself, this is a great place to get how-to advice.
We'd love to have you check out the site and give us some feedback. Meanwhile, it's back to preparing the next Building Challenge for us!
First up, I am proud to introduce you to a new website featuring stop-motion LEGO movies and other LEGO creations...Brick a Brack Studios! This website features the work of one of the third place winners in the LEGO Super Heroes Unite contest that ended this past December. If you click on this link, you can view his winning entry - Our LEGO Batman Adventure Part 1. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that this is the work of the same person I refer to here as LEGODad - my multi-talented husband, Larry.
Check out the free trailers and if you like what you see, consider becoming a member. For as little as $1 a month you will have access to exclusive content, tutorials, forums, and more. And if you'd like to start making LEGO movies yourself, this is a great place to get how-to advice.
We'd love to have you check out the site and give us some feedback. Meanwhile, it's back to preparing the next Building Challenge for us!
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