I swear I can feel a strong smell of ginger while I’m looking at the latest confectionery masterpiece by Koen. The key to success here is that this gingerbread cottage is actually the second version; the first one was baked and served a little more than a year ago. Compare both and you’ll easily notice how much the Friends sets have added to the official LEGO color palette just in this past year. Excuse me for now, I have to go and ask for the recipe.
Guns along the Western Front fell silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. Using LEGO as a medium to acknowledge Veterans Day, Armistice Day or Remembrance Day wherever you are, is just our community’s way of remembering all of those who sacrificed for their country.
Lest We Forget by Simon Liu
Remembrance 2015 by Luc Byard 
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by Deborah Higdon 
Poppy by Fujiia
Lest We Forget by JK Brickworks 
We Will Remember Them by Nick Sweetman
I have a house rule that I can’t sort new minifigs into their bins until I’ve used them in at least one build. As a result, the Banshee from Minifigures Series 14 has been collecting dust on my desk for almost two months. But thanks to Halloween, her wait is finally over! With this build, I wanted to capture some of the eeriness of Halloween and there’s no place eerier than a graveyard at night.
You can see the color version of this photo here.
In a unique take on the phrase “year in review”, Ted Andes built a new 8×8 stud LEGO vignette every week over the entire course of 2014. The resulting collection covers all manner of topics, from the well-known to the downright weird. Often inspired by current events, the builds are always imaginative and creatively built. They also demonstrate a wide variety of building styles, proving there’s an awful lot you can do with a simple 8×8 space!
It’s almost impossible to pick favorites, but here goes…
As well covering all the most popular holidays, Ted managed to include some more ‘extreme’ annual events from around the world:
SPORTS! Clever building techniques are used to convey scale and speed, respectively:
This winter scene, by mrcp6d is a ton of fun. To begin with, the landscaping and snowbanks are perfect. That isn’t easy to do and it gives this model a great foundation. But it is the posing of the minifigs that really sells this build. The grim vikings as they lose, the celebrating of the winners and their fans and the total dejection of the bare-armed woman (isn’t she cold?) as she watches her team come in last really make this scene come alive. It’s too bad bobsledding wasn’t invented until the 1870s because it would have been a great medieval sport!
Joel Baker is the agent for this team of misfits and directly responsible for their behavior. I don’t know about you but I don’t want these guys pawing around my roof on Christmas Eve, blacklight nose or not!
I love how Joel got so much expression into each of these deer. They may only be the ‘B’ team but they have a lot of personality!
Miniland Grandpa takes his young miniland grandson out to harvest their christmas tree. Luis Baixinho built this little scene, which I find quite touching. It always amazes me how much can be conveyed at miniland scale. It reminds me of time spent with my own grandfather and that is always a good thing.
Tis the season for family, friends, snow, gifts, and micro gingerbread houses. Rancorbait presents us this absolutely adorable bite-sized edition, and I personally think the stickers just make it better. It’s a great way to get the iconic royal icing on the roof edges with the candy shingles.
Procrastination. It’s a crippling disease that afflicts millions every year, especially around December. Don’t become a victim – shop now! And if you’re looking for the perfect gift for the LEGO fan that has everything, Chris McVeigh can help you out with this beautiful range of tree ornament kits. Or if you’re a total cheapskate like me, just print them off a set of building instructions. Bah, humbug!
I particularly like the inclusion of the arcade machine ornaments. Also, it looks like the roller ornaments could be easily converted into dreidels. Or with the application of a rubber mallet, possibly even a mkeka.
Lego was kind enough to send The Brothers Brick a copy of the upcoming Santa’s Workshop set for review. I was lucky enough to be the one to review the set, and my 3.5 year old son was lucky enough to help. There are plenty of official photos of the set floating around already, including those in our own coverage of the set reveal, so I’ve tried to concentrate my review on interesting things about the set, rather than take a bunch of new photos. This is partially due too the fact that it has been tough to pry the set away from little hands, as my son ran around the house with it screaming about Santa as soon as I opened the shipping box.
Parts
This set is a virtual smorgasbord of unusual parts, in fascinating colors. The set contains 883 pieces, which is pretty fantastic for a price point of $70. Although I primarily build space and mecha, I can imagine repurposing most parts in this set to my own use. The doors might find themselves languishing for awhile, but that’s balanced out by a huge helping of gold parts. There’s certainly enough gold piping here to outfit a steampunk lab (even the inside of the North Pole sign is a gold lightsaber blade). I was also surprised to see quite a few printed parts for the reindeer (both their faces and backs are printed. I was also rather pleasantly surprised by the number of extras included in the set. There was even a spare cookie! Finally, the set is PACKED with SNOT bricks, it’s almost worthwhile as a parts pack alone.
Minifigs
As with the parts, I was rather happy with the minifigs included in the set. You get Santa, Mrs. Klaus, four elves, and five reindeer. Oddly, Mrs. Klaus and an elf both come with two-sided faces (alternate unhappy faces shown in the photo). The Santa hat is really nice, though I presume it’s the same as the Collectible Minifig Santa, which I don’t have (at least not open). Mrs. Klaus looks like her dress is a new print, and it certainly fits the part. The elves span a variety of personalities, which helps give the set a bit of a Burle Ives Rudolph vibe, which I personally like. Our complement includes “Magic Wand Guy”, and “The Badest Elf There Ever Was.” The latter steals Santa’s cookies.
Speaking of Reinder, though, there are five in the set, four large, and one small. That said, the set doesn’t actually include Rudolph. According the Marcos Bessa, the designer, Rudolph is a character they would’ve had to license. Fortunately, it was easy enough to swap one of the spare Christmas lights onto the small Reindeer’s nose, and Christmas was saved. The Reindeer count has been raised as in issue in my house, so I may have to pick up more of the printed bits on Bricklink, to bring our complement up to the proper eight (plus Rudolph). The tubing used to connect the harness to the sleigh looks long enough to be able to attach at least one more pair of reindeer. “Rudolph” by the way, can apparently even balance on his tail.
The Build
This set was pretty interesting to build. There are some nice SNOT technique used for everything from the Reindeer heads to window construction. It was far beyond my son’s ability to build anything but the minifigs (and repair reindeer), but that’s to be expected. I’m betting that town builders won’t learn much new from building this set, but it’s still a fun build, with a lot of variety. The set is also broken into a series of smaller sections, as most are these days, which allow you to break up the building into discrete chunks, without opening all the bags. There’s also a great little micro-scale Classic-Space ship rolling out of the toy machine, which is marked improvement over the inclusion of another micro scale train for the minifig children to play with.
Overall
This set is a great buy, you get a lot of interesting parts, a lot of useful parts, and some unique animal bits. It was fun to build, and SCREAMS Christmas. If you’ve got kids in your house, it’d be fun to build a chunk at a time, as a build-up to Christmas. It’s surprisingly sturdy for a set in the Creator Expert line, but sleigh can even withstand swooshing by a three year old. It also looks like the two exclusive holiday sets for spending over $99 with LEGO direct this year are annexes to this workshop. I’ve only seen the one available October 1 in the store catalog, but it looks like a little elf workshop that’d match up with the back of this set nicely. The set is available September 17 to VIPs, and October 1 to everyone. I’d recommend waiting until October 1, so you can add something else to your cart, and get the free add-on.
