Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
LEGO Events
I just bought my plane ticket to Brickfair in Washington DC.
Now, I need to find at least one roommate. The room is about $100/day so it would be nice to be able to share it. I have a room reserved for both Fri & Sat nights, Aug 29-30. Hit me up if you are interested. (If you already have a room too, that’s OK – the reservations can be canceled up to 4pm on check-in day.)
UPDATE – The convention, Bricks by the Bay, took place on April 9-11, 2010, and we’re in the planning process for the 2011 event. You can read more about it at the Bricks by the Bay site.
Some of us in BayLUG have been talking about having a LEGO convention here in northern California. This would be similar to some of the existing ones that have been taking place around the country for years:
Brickfest (Washington DC and Portland OR)
Brickswest (San Diego CA)
Brickcon (Seattle WA)
Brickworld (Chicago IL)
Brickfair (Washington DC)
There’s a thread on LUGNET about it started by Russell Clark, the BayLUG president.
If you haven’t heard of these before, here’s the basic idea. We take over a hotel or convention center for a weekend (hopefully a 3-day weekend), and 100+ LEGO fans descend upon it from all over the country (and maybe a few from overseas). The LEGO company usually sends some high level executives and other representatives. The local LEGO store usually has some special discounts and an after-hours sale just for con-goers.
We’re currently looking at hotels in and around Santa Clara and San Mateo, since that’s where our two local LEGO stores are. If you have any ideas for venues or would like to offer support, please let Russell or me know.
In Ted Ward’s pictures from Northwest BrickCon 2006 I came across a picture a while ago of a garden gnome, created by Bill Volbrecht, former LEGO Master Builder.
As far as I know, Ted Ward is no relation to me, and neither is Bill Volbrecht.
As to why this is interesting, I built my own garden gnome in 2006 as well – while I was in Fairfax VA for the Brickfest convention (it wasn’t at the convention; I built it from parts I bought there, in my hotel room afterward). I posted it here shortly after I built it in September 2006. Here’s mine for comparison:
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As for comparing the two, well I think that he did a better job on the mouth and eyes, but then I was limiting myself (as I’ve done for almost all of my sculptures) to only basic bricks, not plates or slopes or round parts. However if I may be so bold, I like my hat better: it is asymmetrical. I also think the details on the belt are better on mine. But the clincher is that his is functional: I believe that the hands are designed to hold business cards. Mine are hidden behind his back because hands are too hard to model :)
From May 31 to July 5, my Blackburn Hotel (Version 2) was on display at the LEGO Store at Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara, CA in the BayLUG window.
This is a redesigned, bigger model of the mythical Blackburn Hotel that I originally built for the Bay Area LEGO Train Club layout. I haven’t done a proper photo-shoot of the hotel itself, but you can see pictures of it in a Flickr set I created to collect all the images of it, including the ones from this store display.
For the store display, however, I had to customize it a bit. I left off the rooftop sign, and modified the baseplates. The version that was used in BayLTC train shows used regular road plates for the street, rather than the tiled half-road (16-stud-wide baseplates) seen in the store display. Also, because the left side of the hotel was located on a street corner, the model didn’t include the road there, while on the right side there was an 8-stud half-alley. When we installed the hotel at the store, that caused the sign to be pressed against the background side wall, and the right side to have a strange gap. So, we ripped the baseplates off the bottom of the hotel and moved everything over by eight studs, putting in a partial road on the left side. Thanks to Russell and Bruce for their help reconfiguring the baseplates.
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
For the third year, the Bay Area LEGO Users Group (BayLUG) is taking part in Maker Faire.
We have a 25-foot square train layout and several additional tables, including a large Technic crane and excavator. The show is open until 6pm today (Saturday, May 3) and tomorrow (Sunday, May 4). Hope to see you here!
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
We had another meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) today at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.
Members of BayLUG descended on the museum’s meeting room for a day of buying and selling parts, schmoozing, and displaying our latest models.
For the meeting contest, which had a Disney theme, I brought a pair of Mickey Mouse ears I had made out of LEGO. I won the contest in the adult category! (Of course, I was the only entry in the adult category, which takes a little bit of the fun out of it…) Unfortunately in the excitement I failed to take a picture of the contest entries…. I’ll post about the mouse ears separately.
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
The Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) took part in Yuri’s Night Bay Area at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, on April 12 2008.
The event was a cross between an airshow, a rave, and a mini Maker Faire (which we will be taking part in next month). We had a display of some of our LEGO models, mostly following a space or futuristic theme, as well as a play area where adults and kids alike could crawl around and build stuff. I brought my DC-3 and the “Fast Flyers” jet.
Click one of the pictures to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
I’ve fallen a bit behind blogging about recent BayLUG meetings, though I did post the pictures online. Here we have pics of the meeting in January at Dave Porter’s house in Woodside. We also had a meeting in Palo Alto on February 24, but I missed that one as I was out of town that weekend. Our next meeting is this coming Sunday, April 20, at MoAH in Palo Alto, and it’s open to the public so come by and say hi!
Club member Dave Porter has a house in the mountains where he puts up a display every year for the holidays featuring a very detailed train layout with lots of great scenery. And every January for the past few years, the club is invited up to view the layout and have a big meeting at his house. It’s always a lot of fun.
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
Exhibit of the Bay Area LEGO Users Group at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA.
Every year BayLUG puts on a “Living LEGO-cy” exhibit at the museum during the Holidays. We put it up in early December and take it down in early January. Families crowd the room to stare at our creations every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during this period. It’s a lot of fun, but it can be a lot of work. I took these pictures on the last day of the latest exhibit, on January 5, 2008, just before we tore it all down and took it all home.
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.
The Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group has a display currently on view at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA. The display was installed on December 8, and these photos were taken on December 15.
You have two weekends left to enjoy the display! The exhibit is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11am to 4pm. Hope to see you there! If you plan to stop by, let me know in advance and I’ll see if I can meet you there. I’m scheduled to help staff the layout on Saturday January 5, but may make other random appearances as my schedule and whim suit me.
My models on this layout include all the buildings in the city block containing the “Blackburn Hotel” and the coast guard base on the “water” table.
Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.