Sometimes the first step in a journey starts long before it has a direction. Give a child LEGO, and who knows where it will take them?
Since I got my first set, LEGO has been an activity that puts me into a creative zone where I lose track of time and forget to eat. Four decades later, it found me at Brickcon 2022. I didn’t know it then, but I was on a road that would lead me to The LEGO House Masterpiece Gallery, a destination I never could have dreamed possible when that first set was placed in my hands so many years ago.
It was my 3rd time taking my creations to a fan event and I was still rather new to the adult LEGO community. The creation I had taken with me was a greenhouse attached to a cottage with a koi pond. Having been to other shows, I was inspired to play with scale, lighting and power functions. Yes, power functions. Because with conventions you want to find something that hasn’t been seen before. For me that was the koi fish attached to clear rods that hooked into a gear assembly under the landscape. I enjoyed the double take when viewers realized that the koi were moving.
Brickcon 2022 was amazing. I received so many complements. I was interviewed several times, featured on Beyond the Bricks channel, and a reel of my moc went viral. I took home my first “Best of Show” award. Still, the best complement was an older gentleman who asked me about my model’s dimensions. I replied with the dimensions only to be asked if I had those in centimeters. I didn’t know at the time, but I had just had my first conversation with Stuart Harris from LEGO House.
The following year I did another big award-winning model. The Silver Pavillion brought me my 2nd Best of Show at Brickcon 2023, and best of category at the other conventions. It was published in “Brick Journal” along with previous models. While my local LUG nominated it for LEGO House, nothing came of it. At its final show I ran into Stuart Harris again, who gave me the insightful feedback that my MOCs were too large for the display cases.
What to do with the knowledge that you went too big? Modify the MOC of course. The Greenhouse was modified to separate from its cottage as proof that I could make it smaller, and have something to offer LEGO House when I saw Stuart again in two weeks at Brickcon. I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to visit LEGO house in October of 24 and see just how the displays fit in the cases. You had artists with multiple models and ones with just a single large creation. It was exciting to be there in person and dream of having my own work featured.
January 2025 saw the start of the model that would later be accepted into the LEGO House Master Builder Gallery. Thanks to a friend, I knew exactly what dimensions to build my next masterwork to. I wanted to come back to my love of the fantasy genre and the ideas were flowing. It needed a waterfall, landscape, castle-styled buildings, lighting and story. It needed to be magic, something that, like my previous creations, would draw you in to a different world. But BrickCan was coming up in April, and that would be a great venue to debut a new model, so it was also a build with a time frame. The more I build for display, the more I think about how to transport the model. This build needed to come apart in chunks to be moved. I had issues with rock work falling apart on the road, so this time my rock work was all done on 16×16 Technic plates. They pin into the main base and can be pulled straight up to be wrapped and packed. It was, all in all, an enjoyable building period as is any where you really get to play with trying new techniques.
Receiving the invite letter from LEGO House was a moment of pure joy. It came in mid-March. The new model was 90% finished at this point. In April, it went to BrickCan 2025 and I came home with my 3rd Best of Show award. The following day, the dimensioned photos were sent to LEGO House to see if it was approved. Instead of posting more online, I let the model rest knowing that it would come back in the spotlight in another 5 months.
Enter the logistics phase of the process. How was I going to ship my large model overseas? When traveling regionally, I tend to put components into a lot of smaller boxes. Smaller boxes are easier to handle and I just don’t have the physical strength to handle all 45lbs of LEGO in one go. In this case, it would have to be different. A friend provided me with a heavy-duty U-Line double corrugated box. 36x18x18in in size, I had the whole thing on a furniture dolly because I couldn’t lift it. The sections were wrapped in stretch plastic and then wrapped in bubble wrap. Into the box it went: the base, the rock panels, spacers. Then another sheet of ply so that the sections at the bottom wouldn’t be crushed. The plants were placed in hard plastic boxes designed for scrapbook papers. Then buildings and bases, the repair kits, and finally padding to fill the voids. The giant box was picked up in mid-August and arrived two days later in Billund. I was very relieved to get the photo of the box un-damaged at its destination.
Throughout this, I was also contending with my own travel arrangements. I knew from others that, by mid-March, cabins for Skaerbaek were gone. However, a motel 10 minutes away was easy to obtain. Builders are allowed a plus one on this journey, so my anxious husband (AKA spousal enabler) was along for his first big adventure overseas. Booking his flight as soon as I got mine even got us seats next to each other for the 9.5 hour flights from Seattle to Amsterdam. In some ways, the dreaming of and planning of the trip can be almost as exciting as the actual event. To those hoping for a similar journey: don’t stop building, don’t stop experimenting. Just put your best out into the world. Amazing things can happen.
