The fourth day of Advent gives us a fawn with a tree (Friends), a Stormtrooper with a Santa Hat and red mug (Star Wars), and a sideboard offering delicious holiday pie and mugs of eggnog (Town). Oddly the Town comes with an extra yellow mug but the Star Wars only gives us one red mug.
I don’t see any tie-in to earlier days so it looks like we’re starting a new “story” here in each of the themes. Maybe later in the series we can find a way to loop back to the first three days.
Tag: City/Town
Advent 2014 Day 1
The time has come for my annual tradition of blogging each day of LEGO’s Advent calendars. This year again we have three calendars, for Friends, Star Wars, and City. Here’s the first entry:
Friends and City give us basic figures, with the City one coming with an extra hair and two printed 1×2 tiles with envelope patterns. Star Wars gives us a micro ship or droid of some kind (I really need to bone up on my Star Wars stuff, sorry). We’ll see what the coming days bring, maybe a storyline or two will emerge?
Octan Gas Station
My LEGO gas station is now on display at the LEGO store in Pleasanton, California at the Stoneridge Mall. I built it in 2012 and first showed it at Bricks by the Bay, but never posted a blog entry about it until now. Continue reading “Octan Gas Station”
Micropolis Buildings
I built some Micropolis buildings according to the TwinLUG standard. I made four modules, which I named for what the residents of Micropolis would use them for: Live, Play, Shop, and Work. Take a look at the pictures on Flickr as a set or as a slideshow.
Sushi Bar
My latest building is a sushi bar.
It is part vignette and part town building.
I built the interior first, starting with a bare baseplate. Only when that was completely finished, I built a basic box for walls with windows and a door in front, and a back door in the rear. The box lifts off easily; the perimeter of the baseplate is tiled, with only one stud on each side (a jumper plate) holding the walls in place.
On top of the walls there is a simple roof, with 6×8 slopes for an overhang and homemade signs, made with my trusty P-touch label maker. (The name of the restaurant is Hoshi Sushi; hoshi means “star” which is because I found that my label maker could make stars….)
The restaurant is staffed by two people: a sushi chef and a waitress. Both are rather overworked, as it is a prosperous enterprise. It was inspired by and loosely based on my favorite local sushi place, Masa’s Sushi in Mountain View, CA.
Some things to look for:
- Chopsticks made from (Minifig Feathers with Pin)
stolen off the roof of my 10185 Green Grocer set. See them clearly here. - The overpreponderance of maguro nigiri (tuna over rice) on people’s plates. This is because the only transparent color I have in 1×1 tiles that looks at all like raw fish is trans-red. I wish I had some trans-orange 1×1’s so I could have sake nigiri (salmon) but alas, no. I have some 1×2’s in trans-orange in the sushi bar waiting to be cut, however. I also have some people eating (non-trans) brown, which I decided is unagi nigiri (eel). None of the other 1×1 tile colors looked at all appetizing, and I couldn’t figure out a way to make maki (rolled) sushi at all at this scale…
- Soy sauce bottles – some are full, others are empty. (I ran out of trans-smoke cones)
- The slightly-too-big-for-minifig-scale maneki neko (beckoning cat) which sits in the back left corner (the prosperity corner, according to Feng Shui traditions) to attract money. Masa’s has a maneki neko in that spot too, but instead of a gold coin, it’s holding a bottle of Asahi beer. I guess Masa wants to invite more beer into his life :)
- See if you can guess what each minifig is thinking….
This model was at BrickFair, but I had a hard time deciding where to put it. I didn’t want to put it on the train layout, since I wanted to show it with the roof and walls removed. There was a “town, non-train” section against the far right wall, but it was full, so I put it on the nearest table to that which was the mosaic table. I also brought it to last Saturday’s BayLUG meeting. But if you missed it, I’m bringing it to BrickCon as well… hope to see you there!
To see all of the pics, click the picture above or click here for a slideshow
Blackburn Hotel at Valley Fair Mall
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.