For those who could not attend here’s a selection of some of the great creations that were on display. Or of course you can find your own by wading through the tags or Brickvention group. And if you took photos please remember to add “Brickvention” and “2012″ to your tags and submit it to the group.

• With full stands and an incredible minifig selection, Jennie Sasson bent walls to capture the geometry and activity of a Quidditch tournament. Her use of 3D for the players gave the tournament a wonderful feeling of action.
• The Canberra LUG brought along this wonderful rollercoaster using the old blue track. Watching it zip around the track was a pleasure. I know David Boddy has some great videos of the show too.
• I have to admit I missed Travis Matheson’s ‘Nova’ ships at the actual event, but having spotted the pictures now I really regret it. Some excellent microscale love.

And of course these are merely a few of the many great models and displays that the 10,000 audience members got to see. We’ve already seen Ryan’s rocket and I’ll blog Mike Pianta‘s and my creation later.

PS. Excuse the messy pictures. WordPress hates this sort of layout for some reason. And I hate taking too much space or boring you with excess words to fill space.

The newest LEGO convention will be held June 1-3, 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Here’s the official description for Bricks Cascade.

Bricks Cascade is a convention held in Portland, Oregon, open to Adult Fans of Lego who excel in building various items of detail whose existence beg a public display to the community. Attendees of the Convention must be at least 18 years of age, or if under 18, can only obtain registration if accompanied by a registered adult. The convention officially begins on June 1st 2012 and ends on the evening of June 3rd, 2012.

Friendships, knowledge sharing, and building techniques are just a few benefits gained by attending the convention. More details can be given about this convention on this web site in the coming months. All Convention Attendees pay $52.00 during our initial registration period. Please fill out all information requested to insure your entrance ID is created without errors and prevent any delays during on-site registration fulfillment.

You can register now at BricksCascade.com.

But I felt I should take a few moments to remind everyone that the public tickets to Brickvention 2012 are selling out fast. So if you want to come see Ryan McNaught’s Apollo 11 (and a bunch of other good stuff) you should book soon.

It’s on in Melbourne Town Hall next weekend (21-22nd Jan 2012)

Have a Merry Christmas!

As ever I expect this event to be heaps of fun. Last year’s event was huge and if past growth continues we can expect this year’s to be even bigger. I’m sure details of collaborative events will be announced closer to the time so keep an eye on the website for future announcements.

The timing makes BV 2012 a bit closer to Australia Day this year so if you’re coming from interstate or overseas try booking your accomodation sooner rather than later.

Please note that this year a new system is in place for registration. And especially note that a pre-purchased ticket will be required to attend the public days. This is to ease waiting times for those attending.

To become a registered attendee able to attend all days and display your models:

Follow this link to the Brickvention 2012 registration page at TryBooking
http://www.trybooking.com/ZYA

Registered memberships cost $60 (plus booking fee).
Make sure you bring along your printed tickets to the event.

Due to venue size, there are only 150 registrations available. The first 50 people who register will be entered into a special competition organised by LEGO Australia.

If you want to just check out the displayed models on the weekend:

Saturday 21st and Sunday the 22nd from 9.30am – 5.30pm are the Public Expo days, allowing the general public of all ages to watch LEGO® builders at work and view LEGO® creations and displays.

You will need to pre-purchase tickets for this display.

Adults – $10 (plus booking fee)
Children – $6 (plus booking fee)

Children under 3 are free

You can purchase tickets at TryBooking

Make sure you bring along your printed tickets to the event!

And if you don’t know where and when it is:

The next Brickvention will be held over the weekend of 21st and 22nd January 2012 at The Melbourne Town Hall, corner of Swanston and Collins Streets Melbourne Victoria, where anyone can come along and view the amazing creations made out of LEGO.

The public exhibition costs 3 swiss francs for kids and 6 for grown-ups.

Sylvain says, “In Switzerland, LEGO events are too rare, so enjoy!

The team has just listed several new creations in their online store.

Fine print: Creations for Charity is a fundraising event for the Toys for Tots charity organization. As such, donations to Creations for Charity itself are not tax-deductible. Creations for Charity is not affiliated with The Brothers Brick.

If you’d like to donate a creation yourself, the deadline for doing so is November 15.

Don’t miss Nannan’s writeup about last year’s fundraiser, which resulted in over $14,000 worth of LEGO for underprivileged children.

Thanks for the tip vmln8r!

Whilst pictures from Brickcon this weekend tantalised those of us that could not get there (I almost fell off my chair when I saw the Tower of Orthanc by OneLug) I am pleased to say that my own weekend was filled with a Lego event closer to home… Steam: The Great Western Lego Show.

Since 2002 the annual Great Western Lego Show has been held in Swindon UK and this year was another amazing event that proved that this is the biggest Lego event in the UK calendar. The event is organised by Martin Long and a team of dedicated volunteers from the Brickish Association and is set in the impressive surroundings of the Steam Museum that is dedicated to the history of the British Railways (which means a serious number of Lego train MOC).

Steam consists of two public exhibition days and some fantastic opportunities for AFOLs to socialise (some people are still hungover ;-)). One thing that really stood out for me this year was the fact that the Lego company really made an extra effort to support this event with the presence of two designers (Jamie Berard and Morten Graff-Wang) over the whole weekend and the simultaneous unveiling of the new Castle Joust set in conjunction with Brickcon.

In addition to a huge number of pretty amazing standalone MOCs like Eyrie Town by Rod Gilles (2 much caffeine, an online friend that I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at this event).

What makes Steam really special is the number and scale of collaborative displays at the event. One of my favourites was The World of Harry Potter that included a series of amazing scenes from the films recreated in Lego. Here is one picture of the Great Hall from Hogwarts by Thorskegga:

And the defence against the dark arts classroom by Andrew Danieli:

One event that dominated the early part of 2011 was the Royal Wedding in April and Warren Elsmore and a team of helpers have created one of the biggest builds I have ever seen with a very accurate recreation of Westminster Abbey… just look at the size of that monster:

For those more interested in Sci-Fi there was plenty on display such as the amazing layout by the Peter Reid (legoloverman, who also impressed me with a few wonderfully detailed custom minifigs that he had created before finally seeing the light and putting such heinous behaviour behind him) and Tim Goddard (RogueBantha):

Humour and amazing building combined in The Seige of Haradford Castle where James Pegrum (peggyjdb) was ably assisted by Barney Main (slyowl) in a rather vicious battle fought between the fleshie and yellow armies over the battlements of a truly impressive castle built by James. The battle progressed throughout the weekend culminating with a win for James after sneakily taking advantage of the fact that Barney had to leave early.

The above are just a few of the highlights of this tremendous weekend and please check out the Gimme Lego blog by Dr. Dave Watford for more insight into the event and the following galleries to see what amazed the over 7,000 visitors to this year’s display.

• Great Western Lego Show Flickr Group
• Picasa gallery
• Photoset by hhcBrick

Looking forward to next year already!

Jas

Wait. I’m kidding. Sleep never enters the equation.

BrickCon has morphed quite a bit for me from my first event to now. I began attending BrickCon in 2005 (it was NorthWest BrickCon at that point). The ENTIRE event fit into the Rainier Room, which now is just the general assembly room. This year marked my seventh BrickCon and ninth overall event.

Time flies when you’re having fun, right?

What’s also changed quite a bit for me is how I experience BrickCon. In the beginning, I was simply an attendee. I registered, I went, I showed off my MOCs, and I went on my merry way. I’d help out coordinating the Castle display when I could. But in 2009, that changed. At one of the SEALUG meetings, it was mentioned that they needed someone to coordinate prizes. “I can do that,” I thought. So I stepped up.

So there’s the story of how I became Prize Coordinator for BrickCon. I can blame (thank?) Sean Forbes for the “Prize Goddess” moniker, and that’s the one that stuck.

Determining which prize goes what, where, and to who is an entirely scientific process, but not really. It’s taking a look once again at what I have to work with and spreading it across the four major ceremonies that have door prizes (Opening, Keynote, Awards, Closing). Making sure those are dividing properly and separate from what goes to the public is important, too. Part of my job ensures that any incoming prizes are dividing amongst the various pools, too, so that one event isn’t too overloaded. I try and keep Closing as short as possible, too, since by that time people typically are packing to head home.

This year we added a sort of “Santa Claus” prize pool for public and private hours. During the public hours, volunteers would wander around the crowds and hand small sets (provided by the con) and kid’s t-shirts (provided by the LEGO Store in Bellevue) to the kids. Watching their faces was amazing; the look of disbelief was typically first, followed by the giant smile. There was some suspicion that the gifts were completely free, but it was pretty easy to work around. Anyone who passed out those prizes had the same smile.

It’s incredibly busy working with the prizes. In terms of BrickCon, if it didn’t involve prizes, I typically had no information or clue about it. My focus was prizes; I needed to be available to receive incoming donations and prep for the next assembly. I had enough time in between assemblies to enjoy spending time with my friends and enjoying BrickCon for what it is.

Thanks to Joe Meno, Andrew Becraft, and Bill Ward for their photos!

The quantity of creations was overwhelming and we had to beg, borrow and steal more area (Many thanks to Steve Walker and Wayne Hussey for making that process virtually painless and to Scott Fowler for graciously giving up part of the neighboring Pirate tables). But quantity doesn’t really say much about a section. It was the quality of the creations that really blew me away. I knew that the builders who were coming had skills but they all out did themselves.

Our collaborative layout was packed with so many builds, flowing from one to another, that it was difficult to see everything and the section of stand-alone models was outstanding.

We had three categories for which builders could win a trophy and a LEGO set. The voters were very hard pressed to make their selections, but they finally did and the winning models and builders were:

Best Overall Castle Creation:
Hogwart’s Castle by Alice Finch
Photo of Hogwart’s by Bill Ward

Best Community Contribution:
Al Wahat by Sebastiaan Arts

Best Fly-in Dragon:
Whiskers by Myself

Hearty thanks also need to go out to the following people and companies: To Will of Brickarms for the awesome contributor packs and prototype weapons that he made especially for us, to Ryan of BrickWarriors for the sweet fig packs he donated and to Learning Loft Toys for the Lego set prizes they donated to our winners.

We all had a great time and plan to make next year even bigger and better. So if you want to ‘Go Medieval’ at BrickCon next year, please join us! BrickCon!!!

We plan on a Numereji 2422 collaborative display at BrickCon 2012 and look forward to the return of great creations, changes to reflect the passage of time, and phenomenal additions.

Congratulations to the winners in our four categories who were acclaimed by peer balloting!

Best Overall: The Ark by Drew Ellis (also Best Capital Ship for the entire Space display)
Best Building: Communication Station Iris by Alex Fojtik (counter-rotating arrays of awesome)
Best Terrain: Numereji Ranchero by Josh Wedin (and unofficial sillyness prize)
Best Vehicle: Scavenger by Shane Weckstrom (NPU purple basketball player pants)

Special thanks to Brandon Bannerman for his CSS Howland hull design and for working on the hulk up to the wire.

Justin Pyne also deserves a shout out for his very close second in the Terrain category and for embracing the challenge of a peaceful space town. Shows heart in a youngster.

I also enjoyed displaying my own Earthship House, and a barn built from a sections of Howland hull. More pics of that once I get a good light box set up and get rid of this stalker rain that followed me back to San Diego.