Building Tips & Fun Stuff on LEGO.com

I’ve been exploring the Lego.com site and wanted to share some discoveries…

1. Creator Building Tips – Really cool tips from some of your favourite designers can be found using the link below. Being more of a City gal I especially like the tips for corner doors, sliding doors, making furniture, fireplace… (k, you get the idea) but vehicle and creature tips are also available.

LINK: Creator Building Tips

2. City Downloads – Think the printable coloring sheets and join the dots activity sheets would be good for kids?

LINK: City Downloads

3. Star Wars Fun – Of course I would mention Star Wars.  Loads of comics and movies (you must have seen the latest being circulated around fan sites…) can be viewed from the SW site.  A must for any SW fan.

LINK: Star Wars Movie & Comics

4. Collectible Minifigs – I find the masks, games & movies interesting.

LINK: Collectible Minifig Masks   /   Collectible Minifig Games /  Movies

That’s all… loads of games but I didn’t feel up to trying… if you know/come across other cool stuff on the LEGO site, do share by leaving a comment k? 

Click HERE to select the product page you want to visit.

P.S. Ran into some technical problems while trying to insert pics (to jazz up this post) so… I give up… am gonna play with some real life bricks now. 😛

Lighted Christmas Display

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I’ve a bit of an obsession with lighted city displays.   Spacepilot3000 from EB shows us how to do one for Christmas with his display of 10199 Winter Toy Shop & 10216 Winter Village Bakery. 

Nice isn’t it?  A bit too early for Christmas?  But even Orchard Road is putting up the Christmas lights, not to mention all the trees in the shopping malls… anyway, the technical details (1mm SMD LEDs etc) can be found in this EB post (LINK) if you are interested to try some drilling and electrical work.

LEGO MUJI sets – at a store near you in Dec?

Remember those LEGO sets created exclusively for MUJI last year? 

Ok, now that you get a better idea (yeah, paper & LEGO) and in case you want them, you may be able to get from your nearest MUJI store in December.  That’s what the official MUJI LEGO website says.  No details on whether any stores will be excluded from the wider distribution but I am hopeful that they will appear in Singapore (nah, no inside info just fingers crossed).  Not sure if I really want these tho… more for kids? 😛

Inaugural AFOLCON in Manchester (UK)

I wish I can go! That’s my 1st reaction after reading this piece of news from Brickset. 

In short, it’s a US-style convention for AFOLs from 28 april to 2 May 2011 at Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, UK.  A quick calculation of the costs works out to a cool S$10K/GBP5K [flight, accommodation, loads of shopping (LEGO & non-LEGO) for 2 pax] plus a bone breaking 16 hour flight – so I won’t be there.  But if you can attend or is interested to find out more, the official site is:

http://www.afolcon.com

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“Recently announced at the Skaerbaek LEGO fan weekend, AFOLCON is a brand new event for the UK and Europe in 2011. Located in central Manchester, AFOLCON will comprise of a two day conference for Adult Fans Of LEGO, with exclusive content from LEGO, TT Games and more. After the conference days, AFOLCON will open its doors to the public for three days.

“AFOLCON is a new style of LEGO event for Europe. Based on the US style of conventions, AFOLCON will give fans the ‘inside track’ to the LEGO company and licensing partners.

“AFOLCON aims to bring the best of Billund to you! Think Comic-con, but for LEGO! The two private days will include a number of speakers, who will be showing exclusive information not available anywhere else! These include:

• LEGO set designers, showing early set mockups, designs and how a LEGO set is brought to life
• TT Games designers, detailing the process behind creating models for games such as LEGO Harry Potter and LEGO Indiana Jones

“Many more great speakers are yet to be announced. As well as getting the inside track information, AFOLCON attendees will receive a limited edition souvenir brick and a number of other special benefits throughout the whole conference including discounted LEGO!

“We want your MOCs! AFOLCON attendees are also encouraged to bring their LEGO creations to show off throughout both the private and public days. Following the private conference days, the doors will be opened to the public for a long weekend to showcase the best AFOL creations around! The public days will be widely advertised in conjunction with LEGO to encourage thousands of people to come to the show and see your LEGO creations.”

Some MOCs I Like

Just met some A/TFOLs at a local store and was asked about my blogging frequency.  Apart from the usual “busy at work” and playing with the sets I got, I’ve also been busy playing hero in the land of Albion.  It doesn’t mean I stop posting stuff that are noteworthy, but some of the recent news like the new Architecture Series set – 21007 Rockefeller Center and all the partnership stuff with NASA I simply wasn’t interested enough to post after reading them. 

Anyway… interesting piece of news that I read recentlyfrom BrickJournal issue #12 (thanks to Andrew!) is that marcosbessa who is one of my favourite builders has joined TLG as a product designer. Am looking forward to seeing his work in future sets.

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Larry Lars made this Court House modeled after an actual building in Karlstad, Sweden for an exhibition at a local museum.

 RGB900 has created a Salon for fashionable minifigs to style their hair. Check out details like the TV on level 2. Very nicely done!  And great idea to put in the removable walls. 🙂

Pannier Tank 0-6-0 by bricktrix looks good… not a train person to really judge but to my untrained eye it looks good. 😛

I wonder if this LEGO Rocking Horse by  Bartosz Kurek really can be used? Perhaps a glued version?

And I leave you with this Transformable & Motorized Wall-E by  GYUTA. Apart from looking really cute, it can be packed up into a box and it moves too! Plus it also comes with it’s own little cooler box. Think this is the best LEGO Wall-E version I’ve seen so far. What do you think? Video after the pic (transformation starts at 1 min 54 sec into the video).

Preparations for Christmas

So you got your Winter Toy Shop & Winter Village Bakery.  Perhaps even the Holiday Train.  Think you are all set for Christmas decorations?  How about decorating the tree?

Lazy ones (like me!) could just whack a bunch of LEGO keychains and hang them up I guess… but if you are really keen on a uniquely decorated tree, you can refer to Powerpig’s blog (via Gizmodo) for instructions on building ball ornaments for Christmas.  Yeah, really not too early to start especially if you need to place an order in Bricklink 1st.

Anyway seeing Powerpig’s ornaments got me thinking, and so I did some google searches and found some instructions for brick built ball ornaments in Brickshelf (from Mike Walsh):

• Lego Red Ball
• Lego Blue and Yellow Ball

While LEGO did come up with some ball ornaments last year:

But I think  using the builds on LEGO.com  or your advent calendars would be nicer (and probably cheaper if you intend to decorate the entire tree). 

You can get clear fillable ball ornaments from crafts shop (or online) – these ball ornaments come in a variety of sizes so you’ll probably need to measure and then decide how many of each you need. 

To solve the problem of putting the advent calendar items inside, I think you can get Dish 6 x 6 Inverted (Radar) from Bricklink or LEGO PAB online (Parabola 6X6) to provide the base support.

So what do you think? Will you be decorating your tree with LEGO ornaments? If you do pls share a pic k? You can insert photos into comments. 🙂

Collectible Minifig Series 3 Pic

Since I’ve seen this before, am not too excited but I thought some of you would like to have clearer pics.

Via Brickset