Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks

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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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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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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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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