These elves give the old shoemaker the boot

Builder Lego_nuts has cobbled together yet another stunning LEGO model, this one direct from the pages of a Brothers Grimm classic: The Elves and the Shoemaker. It’s good to see their expressive figure design from this Van Gogh piece reused here for the shoemaker and his wife. Putting the humans in this scale both makes for some adorable minifigure-scale elves, but it also allows for such magnificent detail in the rest of the build. You can see the scraps of cloth strewn throughout the workshop, all of the official parts from a LEGO set. And there’s the intricate nature of the sewing machine and grandfather clock, excellent builds just on their own. But what really gets me most about this design are the 19 different shoe designs hiding throughout it!

The Elves and the Shoemaker

And in case you’ve already started counting the shoes, there are technically 21 unique shoe styles, not 19. You can see the shoes worn by the shoemaker and his wife in this accompanying video, even though they’re not visible in the final photo. In the video, they walk through all the components of the build, from heel to toe.