A Lego Easter Bonanza

So I have been a bit remiss in doing any posts recently, partly laziness, partly work has been sapping my will to live and partly I have been busy with my Lego pursuits. Being a member of a couple of Registered Lego User Groups (RLUG) there have been some building competitions for us AFOLs and children alike.

Competition 1

For 2x4 day, namely 2 April 2016, Jay's Brick Blog ran a competition to see what people could build with only 2x4 Lego bricks. This was more challenging than I anticipated, and as a lot of my Lego supplies are in storage I had to rely on the Lego Digital Designer (LDD) to formulate my design. 

This was my first foray into LDD land and I must say it was not necessarily easy or intuitive to use. I struggled through and eventually got the hang of how to make the software work for me to build me design.

My 2x4 day entry

I ended up going with a representation of the London Underground symbol as I lived in London for a couple of years and was feeling nostalgic given the recent terror incident. Now, as you may recall from my introductory post, I have no ability to visualise, which makes creating my own designs a very difficult challenge so I was pretty happy with how my design turned out given it could only consist of 2x4 bricks.

With the entry you had to include a short description, no more than 30 words, and I went with a haiku, just for something different.  

London is timeless

The community stands strong

With bricks we rebuild    

Can I just say that 30 words is nothing, I can use 30 words without saying anything of substance so to include a short description and a haiku within the allotted word count was no mean feat (see that was 37 words and this sentence is no closer to providing anything of substance)!

I was sadly not one of the winners but I was ok with that as there were some really creative entries and some of the ones that didn't win I considered were actually better than the prize winners. If you want to see the whole line-up you can check it out on Jay's Brick Blog here.

Competition 2

Lego ran a social media Easter promotion where you had to take a Lego Easter related photo and tag it with social media. This was pretty new to me as I am not a massive fan of the social media phenomenon but by the end of the weekend I took my set of photos I had a youtube account, flickr account, joined some Lego user groups on Facebook and of course the blog - I felt properly inducted into the social media zeitgeist.

Competition Photo

The photo did not have to be a Lego build but of course if you are entering a Lego photo competition you are likely mildly obsessed with Lego and as such will build something from Lego for the photo, just like I did!

The photo that made it into the flickr group for the competition was:

I was pretty proud of the effort as I felt like it captured Easter and Lego and general adorableness. I have had a few people like it on flickr which was quite exciting (oh no I can feel the need for validation growing - the hipster social media generation has taken over!)

I also got a mention on one of main blog sources for all Lego sales news - Bricking Around. It was so exciting to see my photo in a blog post about the competition. Please check out my brush with blog fame here.

I took a couple of other photos that I didn't upload for the competition but thought I would share.

Runner Up 1 - Bunny in Teacup

Runner Up 2 - Batman Bunny Attacks

Competition 3

The third competition that I am working on is in celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the Lego Creator Modular. The competition requires entrants to build a mini modular.

The winner gets one of every Lego Creator Modular ever released, EVERY SINGLE ONE! That is not a competition I can possibly pass up on as just to have the chance to win one of the retired modulars like the Fire Brigade or Green Grocer is drool inducing.

I am going to use the LDD for this project and will get it underway soon as the competition closes on 12 May 2017. I am drawing my inspiration from the amazing art nouveau buildings that I saw all around Riga in Latvia. They were beautiful, with incredible organic details and symmetry galore. The symmetry is possibly my favourite element as it is so calming to the eye. 

I will share my entry once it is complete and let you know how I go.

So this was a bit of a self serving blog post updating you all on the goings on in my Lego world so I would love to hear from any of you about what is going, what have you been up to over Easter, have you entered any Lego competitions and the list of curiosities goes on.

Yours in brick, 

C