Events – Page 18 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Great Train Expo, Pleasanton, November 2006

I spent much of Thanksgiving weekend at the Great Train Expo in Pleasanton, CA, at the BayLTC layout. Click the photo to see the rest of my pics on Flickr, or check out the slideshow.

As usual, my primary contribution was in the downtown area, where I lined both sides of one street (mostly) with my models, including the Blackburn Hotel and Luigi’s Italian restaurant. I didn’t build anything new for this show, as I really haven’t had the time to build lately and my LEGO work space is currently a big, big mess. Hopefully I can get that cleaned up soon and get back to work![tags]lego,trains,trainshow,pleasanton[/tags]

Show open in Pleasanton

Last night we set up the BayLTC show in Pleasanton at the Great Train Expo. I forgot my camera so no pics yet, but I’m bringing it today. Come on down and say hi!

BrickFest PDX 2007

I’m very excited by the recent announcement that BrickFest PDX 2007 will be held next spring (March 30 – April 1) in Portland, OR. I missed the last one (in 2004) and after attending the big BrickFest in Washington, D.C. I’m very excited about all things BrickFest. I’m definitely planning to go, and hoping some of the other BayLUG members will take part as well. It’s unlikely we’d do anything as organized as schlep an entire train layout up there the way we did for the BricksWest 2003 convention, but hopefully we can make our presence felt in some way…

Mark your calendars now! Will I see you there?

BayLUG Meeting, October 8 2006

On Sunday I attended a meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.

The theme of the building contest for this meeting was “Harvest” and I created a vignette featuring the Grim Reaper (with a Halloween tie-in). It came in tied for first place!! I received a small Star Wars microscale Imperial Shuttle set as a prize. I’ll blog about that vignette when we get closer to Halloween…

There was also plenty of shameless commerce going on. I picked up a bunch of useful parts from Uncle Dan’s smorgasbord, and a bunch of minifigs from Mark Benz.

Besides my contest entry, I also displayed my DC-3 and moonbase “mobile lounge” – both of which are also in the “to be blogged about” category – and my Scarlet Mayhem spaceship.

Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,baylug,moah[/tags]

No NWBrickCon for Me

It’s official, I’m not going to Northwest BrickCon. Having just gone to BrickFest a month ago I really can’t justify another trip right now, and besides BayLUG is having a meeting that weekend.

I was really hoping to go to NWBC to meet some of the folks who weren’t able to come to BF. I met a lot of west coast LEGO folks at BricksWest 2003, but haven’t seen any of them since, except for a few who made it to BF this year. Hopefully next year, NWBC and BF won’t be so close together!

I am still hoping to make it to BrickSouth next spring in Atlanta. I met a few of the Georgia classic space guys at BF and am looking forward to that event. Hopefully I can build some kind of impressive spacecraft to show there.

Damaged in Transit

As you may recall, while we were back east for BrickFest I bought a bunch of LEGO and built two new models, the Scarlet Mayhem spaceship and Garden Gnome sculpture.Well it turns out I bought a lot of LEGO. Way too much in fact. So much that I had to buy a 5-piece luggage set (3 suitcases, a handbag, and a toiletries bag) and all 3 suitcases were basically packed full of LEGO.

The current air travel rules allow each person to have up to four bags: two pieces of checked luggage, a carryon, and a “personal item.” With the new bags full of LEGO, Holly and I were right at that limit. And all the bags were packed quite full.

As a result there really wasn’t any way to give my MOC’s adequate padding to keep them from being destroyed. I was able to put them in plastic bags so that the damaged bits would at least stay together. The photos you see here are the result. Although it looks really bad (and in fact, the gnome was even worse – I snapped the picture about halfway through putting him back together), it actually wasn’t very hard to rebuild them by consulting the photos I had taken, so I was able to rebuild both models in fairly short order. I plan to bring them both to the next BayLUG meeting (assuming I don’t go to Northwest BrickCon instead, which is still a possibility).[tags]lego[/tags]

Best of BrickFest 2006

I’ve finally had a chance to go over all the photos I previously posted from BrickFest, and selected what I feel are the best. Some are great photos, while others are photos of great things. Still others are just photos of things that are quintsentially BrickFest. Click the picture to the right to view the 79 pictures I selected, or go straight to a slide show.

I also added tags and titles to all the photos I had uploaded, and deleted a few that were redundant or out of focus. If you would like to see all the pictures, click these links:

[tags]lego, brickfest, brickfest2006[/tags]

BrickFest 2006, Day 3 – Turn out the lights, the party’s over…

So that brings us to the final day of BrickFest 2006. My pictures are up on Flickr and just about everyone’s gone home. I started the day by attending a discussion on Capital Ships run by some of the experts from classic-space.com, including Jon Palmer, Adrian Drake, Mark Sandlin, and Chris Giddens. We met in a conference room on the first floor where we discussed some of the techniques and challenges for building and transporting very large spaceships made of LEGO, and then we went up to the exhibit hall where some of these things were demonstrated on the ships there.

After that I went to a discussion on LEGO as art vs. LEGO as toy, which was led by Roy T Cook, who in addition to being a LEGO builder is also a professor at Villanova University. I think the consensus was that while LEGO is a toy, it can be used as an art medium, but it depends on a number of factors including the context in which the model is made. I learned a lot about the philosophy of art and it gave me a lot to think about.

The afternoon was taken up with dealing with the crowds who attended the public exhibition. After they cleared out around 4 pm, we started tearing down the displays in the exhibit hall. My vignettes took about 30 seconds to tear down, but some of the guys didn’t finish until after midnight. We had closing ceremonies in the evening with a lot of door prizes being handed out. I didn’t win any, but I was pretty happy winning the small vignette contest.

Holly and I went out to dinner at a great Japanese restaurant in Fairfax called Blue Ocean (where we had also had the most amazing lunch on Friday). The food was great, but they were very busy so the service was slow.

After dinner we returned to the hotel where I hung out with the Classic Space guys and we stood around chatting until they were done tearing down, then we retired to the (closed) hotel bar where we all sat around talking until about 1 am. I drove Tom McDonald to the airport, came back to the hotel, and went to bed. I can’t wait for next year! In the meantime I hope we can attend Northwest BrickCon in Seattle and/or BrickSouth in Atlanta next spring.[tags]lego, brickfest, brickfest2006[/tags]

Brickfest 2006, Day 2 – and some good news

I’ve uploaded my pictures of Day 2 of Brickfest 2006 to Flickr.

The good news? We won!!! Our model “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” won the award for best small vignette out of all the vignette models at Brickfest! Holly and I are very pleased. Thanks to everyone who voted for it. Here’s a picture I took the other day of the winning model:
[tags]lego,brickfest,brickfest2006[/tags]

Brickfest 2006, Day 1

Day one of Brickfest 2006 is done.

I spent a lot of time looking over the MOCs that had been brought in since the night before, and attended a facinating presentation on making brickfilms, which I recorded on my camcorder and plan to post on YouTube soon. The exhibit halls had been updated quite a lot with new models being brought in that morning so I took a lot of new pictures.[tags]lego,brickfest,brickfest2006[/tags]