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.

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. 🙂

Winter Village Bakery vs Winter Toy Shop

I finished building my Winter Village Bakery 10216, and I have to say I feel kinda disappointed.  Was trying to understand why and I think it’s a mix of (i) no longer having the novelty factor; (ii) me preferring the Winter Toy Shop 10199; and (iii) feeling really irritated the WVB build process.

Pt (iii) may need a bit of explanation – you see, the bags in WVB are not numbered, which means I was spending probably half my build time looking for parts.  Maybe I’m spoilt by other sets (hey, HP Hogwarts was nicely numbered), but I find the lack of numbered bags extremely irritating during the build.  

I also don’t like the horse carriage at all.  Hmm… or is it just that the minifigs in WTS are more charming (cute mouths) and the minature toys are cuter that’s why I liked the WTS so much more?   

While WVB doesn’t inspire me to the same degree of liking as the WTS, but the building in WVB is still charming and I like the frozen pond (and the trans blue plates!).  So it’s still a must get or what else do you display during christmas? And it seems to be a continuing theme too – rumours is that there’ll be another winter set in 2012.

What happened to the cat?

😦

I had settled down for a relaxing afternoon of City Advent Calendar (2824) building and was really enjoying the build until Day 6 – Girl with Cat:

So what is so disturbing about the pic above? Well, have a look at this:

Yep, cats in Lego land used to have proper eye printing and a nose, and they are now…faceless and kinda creepy looking.  I really liked the previous cat with face printing. It’s got lovely big eyes with eyelashes and all.  Seeing the new one just tells me again that the Lego quality is going downhill. 😦

Apart from the creepy cat, the 2010 Advent Calendar isn’t too bad. 

Likes:

• Pricing is really decent in Singapore (offer at S$36.90 in most stores). 
• As expected I like the little toy models
• The naked santa in shower is funny
• Love the baguette & sausages
• Loads of extra parts at the end of the build. 

Dislikes:

• Minifigs are nothing special tho (would have been good if they’d include a rarer female torso),
• The rest of the builds (apart from minature toys) were not very exciting.
• Also didn’t understand why they had to have 2 wagons in different colors (red & yellow – very repetitive). 
• Creepy cat

I’ll have given it a 8/10 overall but after minus 2 points for the creepy cat it’s 6/10.

Pic of Girl with Cat credit to DHCP1121 from EB who shared his review of the 2010 City Advent Calendar here: Link.

2010 Kingdoms Advent Calendar Review (7952)

SPOILERS ALERT!

The Cobra from EB has shared the long awaited (for me anyways) review of 7952 Kingdoms Advent Calendar.  Most interesting factoid? No ‘made in China’ print on the box!

The review is part of the Eurobricks Reviewers Academy second anniversary celebration and the other great reviews are:

• 3431 Streetball 2 vs 2 written by Inconspicuous
• 6595 Surf Shack written by The Cobra
• 7570 Ostrich Race written by WhiteFang
• 7953 Court Jester written by JimButcher
• 8089 Wampa Cave & Snowspeeder written by Rufus
• 8096 Emperor Palpatine’s Shuttle written by Rufus
• 21005 Fallingwater written by Svelte

****************************************************************
Finally some interesting stuff after DAYS of nothing… no leaked sets, no official releases, no ‘wow’ MOCs. 😛

I did have fun reading the reviews so go ahead and click on the links k? 🙂

2010 City Advent Calendar Review (2824)

SPOILERS ALERT!

DHCP1121 from EB has shared his review of the 2010 City Advent Calendar here: Link.

I really like the minature toys!

My modular Winter Toy Shop

This post is in response to a request from an EB member who wanted a closer look at the modular winter toy shop in the street pic I posted in my modular corner cinema entry (Link  to post).

Actually, haven’t found a purpose for it yet, so not a toy shop (since there will be a TRU in my town 😉 ) and the interiors are not done up too. But 1st some background…

1st Version – Winter Toy Emporium

This is my first modular MOC, or rather, the 2nd incarnation of it.

My first originally looked like this, and actually came complete with interiors, winter landscaping and little scenes that I found amusing (I especially liked the last pic below). I named it ‘Winter Toy Emporium’ and worked on it around October 2009, just after the Winter Toy Shop (10199) was available. 

This took 2 sets of Winter Toy Shops and 2 sets of Harry Potter Shrieking Shack (4756):

2nd version – Unnamed White Building

Somehow, I found  the building lacking and besides I really didn’t have space to keep it displayed.

So still using the parts from the 2 Winter Toy Shops (10199), I decided on a mostly white themed building that still retained the stuff I loved in 10199 – the distinctive roof and the red and white awnings.  I also kept the chimney and fireplace. It also comes with a 3rd floor living quarters for the shop owner, and an attic storage area.

I think you’ll agree the 2nd version is a lot girlier… not sure if by conscious or unconscious design but I do like it that way – hey, whatever I can do to make my town more comfy for ladies k? 😛

I thought of making it a lingerie store, but I really didn’t have enought princess leia or mermaid torsos to make that happen. So the possibilities now are either a clothing store (ladies of course!) or a nice cafe, y’know, the kind where gals love to get their dose of desserts?  But it’s not gonna happen unless I get a huge order of Bricklink parts…

You may have noticed that it looks kinda lopsided? It’s something I struggled with but couldn’t fix without taking away the part I like most about the 10199 -the roof.  So my ‘solution’ is to put it next to a shorter building, like my cinema or Marketstreet… some new street views:

Update on 16 Aug: Realised I forgot that the white building works as a double storey building too. So a few quick snaps today, and in black and white background just for variety. 🙂