Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
For the eighth day of Advent we get three nice little models.
The Star Wars spaceship is one I don’t recognize, but I like those curved parts on the wings. The Friends set is a little table and stool, with a 2×2 round brick and 2×2 square tile in lime green and a pink mug. The most elaborate is the City model, a little wall with skis and poles, which matches the wall we saw in Day 5.
Day 7 brings us two very detailed models in City and Star Wars, and a great accessory pack in Friends.
Especially compared to yesterday’s small parts count, this is a pretty big haul. The Naboo space ship has 16 parts plus the 3 extras, and the little remote control fire truck and remote control has 17 parts and 4 extras. The space ship in particular is a pretty detailed build, and involves some really clever SNOT techniques. I especially liked the use of the two clips behind the cockpit to hold the tail in place.
Here we have three figures for Day 6 of the LEGO Advent calendars. Star Wars gives us a battle droid, Friends gives us a girl with a Christmas sweater, and City gives us a kid throwing snowballs with a safety helmet.
Since it was after midnight when I posted Day 4, I’m going to put up Day 5 now too…
In Day 4, we got a staircase with a magic wand in City, so now of course a brick wall with an axe hanging from it is the obvious next step… Obviously. I suppose these are all related in some way to firefighting? The yellow thing could be a fire extinguisher, and firemen use axes, and brick walls are fire-resistant…
I don’t know what the brown thing is in Star Wars… some kind of land-based vehicle I assume. I don’t really know much about Star Wars outside of the original three movies, and I don’t think this was from those.
The Friends set has a lovely little snowman – finally something that makes sense.
I’m playing catch-up on the Advent calendars, having started blogging on December 4th. This is the fourth entry and that brings us up to date (though it’s now after midnight as I write this, so we’re into day 5).
In Friends, we get skis and ski poles, which makes sense. Star Wars brings us a micro Star Destroyer, okay. But in City we have …. stairs? And a magic wand? What is this for?
Day three in the Advent calendars brings us a Christmas tree, a decorative lamp with an ornamental sprig of green, and some kind of Gungan catapult thingy.
I had to double-check the boxes to confirm that the Friends set gives us the lamp, and the City set gives us the tree. The oval shield in trans-purple with the printing on it in the Star Wars set is a really neat part. I really like the streetlamp design, but the tree is a pretty common design – every year there’s one very much like this in the Advent calendar set(s).
The second door in each of our LEGO Advent Calendar sets gives us Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars set, a pink sled in the Friends set, and a chainsaw with log in the City set.
The chainsaw is a clever build, using two pistols (or gas pumps, or fire hose handles, if you like) and a 1×1 brick with studs on four sides. The sled is pretty simple, but it includes “Panel 1 x 2 x 1 with Rounded Corners and Central Divider” in pink! And the less said about Jar Jar the better.
Every year LEGO puts out at least one Advent calendar, each one typically folowing a particular theme. This year for the first time (that I know of) we have three Advent calendars: Star Wars (9509)
I’m writing this on December 4th, so I’m a bit behind. I’m going to catch up by posting the first four entries tonight, and then try to stay on top of them each day. Unlike some bloggers I feel it is important for me to actually open up the set and build it on the day, but this weekend I was so busy and overwhelmed, and only got three hours of sleep Friday and Saturday nights thanks to being out too late and being woken up too early by factors beyond my control. Anyway, I’m back to a more normal sleep schedule now, and will endeavor to stay on top of this with a daily post. Wish me luck!
When I opened up Day 1 in each of the calendars I found a little plastic bag of LEGO parts and a little paper page. Each calendar has a paper page with the legal warnings about choking on small parts and pictures of other sets in that theme. When you open the door for each day, there’s a small picture of the set you are to build on the back side of the door, and you pull out the little plastic bag and build it. There’s no step by step instructions though, so it can be a little more difficult to build the more intricate models than a typical LEGO set that spoon feeds the build to you in individual steps. They’re never all that hard though.
The big surprise I got however came when I opened the Friends calendar for Day #1, and found the wrong parts! I opened a couple of other doors at random and found the same thing. Eventually I figured out that my set was built wrong. I don’t know if they’re all this way or if I just got one that was defective, but the tray that contains all the stuff to build was put in backward. I opened up the box, pulled out the plastic tray with 24 bins in it, turned it around, and put it back in, and then not only Day #1 but the other doors I had opened were now correct.
Anyhow, I built the three models, and here they are – a micro scale space ship for the Star Wars calendar, a minidoll in the Friends calendar, and a firefighter minifig (with an extra helmet and bullhorn) in the City calendar.
The spaceship is the only thing that is at all challenging to build, of course, and the parts assortment is pretty ordinary, so there’s not much to write about.
The final set in the Friends Second Wave is LEGO Friends Summer Riding Camp 3185
First let’s look at the building containing what I call the “canteen” on the ground floor, and bunk beds on the upper floor. The canteen has some nice parts usages to build a counter and what I guess is a vending machine for drinks, and upstairs we have room for two campers to sleep in bunk beds. Out front we have a hedgehog with his food dish, and some nice flowers. Like Olivia’s House, it comes apart into separate modules for each level so you could mix and match them.
The next building is similar, with a classroom on the ground floor (using the printed 4×6 piece from Olivia’s Invention Workshop) and two regular beds instead of bunk beds. Lots of wonderful light purple 1×6 tiles here!
Next there’s a little tack station with a place to hang the reins and store the saddles, and supplies for scrubbing down the horses.
Now we consider one of the most interesting parts of this set – the bathroom facilities. There’s a shower and a room with a toilet and sink. The privacy afforded to our campers here is minimal at best – they’d better hope no boys come sneaking around to peer over or under those shutter doors!
We round out the camp’s furnishings by looking at the front gate, campfire, and corral. These offer some great play possibilities but few great parts. I like all the white axles in the corral though!
My favorite part of this set is the next part, a van and trailer. Clearly inspired by the Volkswagen van of the 1960s-70s, the van really captures the look of that iconic vehicle, except for the fact that those wimpy air-cooled motors were rubbish for towing anything. Hopefully there’s not much in that trunk in the trailer.
Finally here are all the extra parts and (ugh) stickers.
This set sure is massive, and certainly hits the mark in terms of playability factor for girls. But as for parts for an adult builder goes, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost. Like the other buildings in the Friends line, the bricks are mainly tan, which is not that special. There are a lot of parts in the new Friends colors, but it’s probably more economical to source them via BrickLink.
That concludes my review of the Friends sets. Hope you’ve enjoyed them. If you buy these for any kids in your life, or for yourself, post a comment and let me know what you thought. And as always thank you for supporting the site by using my Amazon
Today we examine LEGO Friends 3189 Heartlake Stables
This set is the most complex I’ve built so far in this wave. You get two stables and a barn, two horses, and some equestrian accessories. It’s all pretty basic construction, but I imagine girls will be able to have a ton of fun playing with it once built. A few observations I have about the build:
