Our Bricktastic Christmas Video

We worked really hard to put this Christmas stop motion video together just in time before the holidays.  It took many hours of filming to get it just right, but here it is, our first attempt at animating our Lego.  Hope you enjoy, and please follow our Youtube channel too!

Merry Christmas!

Throwback Christmas scene

My family helped us build this Lego Christmas village a few years ago, back in 2015 when we were much smaller.

Is that minifigure wearing a home made Santa hat?

It kind of started when we saw the Christmas village in Michael's craft store, and didn't want to leave until we had spent about 20 mins looking and marvelling at it.  After that, we ended up planning our own village at home out of the Lego that we have, and it would be a great family activity.

Welcome to Brickville!

We started by laying down a sheet of quilt batting on the play table to look like snow. The train tracks are from a wooden railway set. Then we added some black construction paper sheets to be the paved area of the town square.  We placed a mini green tinsel tree as the centre of the square.  All of us shared ideas on what buildings we would like to make, and made a list of what things our town would have.

Our Lego inspired Christmas village

There's the train station...

E1 proudly built this one, incorporating larger Lego Duplo pieces

Brickville Station

There's the Town hall.

E2 built the school.

a bustling town square

We built a few houses and placed them here and there.  We added a "hot chocolate and crepes" vendor stand, just 'cause...

The hot chocolate stand. Who is that holding up the line?

Someone can't decide what to order. 

The town had to have a park with a skating rink too, since skating has become one of our own family winter activities.  The skating rink is just a blue construction paper circle with wax paper over it.

  Lots going on at the park... including a penguin and a minion learning to skate

Beside the park is the church. 

Doors are open, welcome in!

Look out for the seagull on the roof

Then there's the toy store.

What did officer Legoman just get from the store?

Finally, one of E2's favourite things is the Lego train he built, running along tracks, and it is glad to visit Brickville for Christmas.

the train

Building community

This past Saturday we got together with our friends at BrickAwesome in Alliston and spent some time building with Lego.  We met some more kids like us who are Lego fans and enjoy building.

All of us pitched in to find the right pieces to build this roller coaster set!

We helped build a rollercoaster set and made some other creations. E1 made a green video game console with a blue screen.

E1 shows his F-T game console

We had so much fun, can't wait until next time!

For more information on the BrickAwesome lego fan club, visit brickawesome.ca

E2's Dragon and Egg

This is my dragon! My dragon is breathing fire.

This is my dragon and her baby dragon.  Isn't it cute?

The baby dragon is hatching out of its egg.  The baby dragon is a boy.

What should we name him? Please let us know if you have any ideas!

Roar!

What's his name going to be?

Comment to let us know what his name should be!

Our #BuildToGive Lego submissions

We just heard about a very cool thing the Lego company is doing for Christmas; they are inviting everyone to build Christmas decorations, take a photo, then upload it with the hashtag #BuildToGive.  With each submission, they plan to donate a Lego set to a child in need this season.
So, we wanted in on it too... we always love another reason to play with Lego.
What a great cause to build for!

Here's a link to our first Lego approved submission on their page, it's called:
Wyldstyle Gives a Giant Gift

Here are the other entries we sent in just after that: (Click each link to see the pictures!)

Me at the North Pole

Snowy Sledding Hill

The Grinch

Lost Reindeer

Christmas Gifts

Christmas Tree Gift

And our mom even made one too, it's Christmas Ice Cream Cake with Spoon 

There are also so many other cool fan built creations that have already been made.  To see them all visit: https://ideas.lego.com/activities/334265b2-a554-4eec-9835-ec6ae9329a36#/?query=&sort=newest

#BuildToGive

E1's Roman Temple

For the fun of it, I studied a bit about early Roman history, and thought it was so interesting I created my own Roman Temple.  Some interesting things I learned were:

• Their empire lasted for over 500 years.
• They had a very strong army.
• The Romans were pagans who worshipped many gods in different temples.

Front view

Side view

top view

View of top without its roof. In the Roman Temples, there was usually a statue of whom it was devoted to

See the statue in the centre of the temple.

Temple with the roof removed so you can see architecture better

Roof side view

If you'd like to learn about the ancient Roman civilization, I recommend reading lots of books on Rome and watching documentaries like (dvd) Secrets of Archaeology: Roman Empire and Beyond.

BrickAwesome Lego Fan event part 2

BrickAwesome in Barrie!

In our last post, we showed some pictures of what we were going to display at the event.

Now, here are some pictures of other fan creations at the event:

This 'Queasy Kitty' was made with over 15,000 Lego bricks!

Winter Village had two Lego trains circling the village. 

Falconridge was a big Lego medieval village with lit up areas

The Lego Roller Coaster operated by gravity using well designed twists and drops. 

Lego Marvel 

Transformers

A Classic Lego Space City

A Lego Baseball game

Lego Taj Mahal

And here's how our display looked at the event:

The BrickAwesome Lego fan event was even covered by local CTV news.  Here's a link to a brief clip about the day: 

https://barrie.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1814365&binId=1.1272429&playlistPageNum=1

There was even a news camera from CTV present!

There were so many awesome displays from other builders; it was so neat to meet other Lego enthusiasts.

Lego Star Wars display

We has so much fun; there was a table set up with piles of bricks to build with, including wheels to make racers.  We made several models to race and play with.

Another table had racing lanes set up for mini car drag racing. 

There were five Speed Building challenges, and we took part in all of them.

We're speed building the Jet!

Here is a video of us doing the Sailboat Speed Build.  E1 finished first!

And we won an award at the end for 'Spectacular Build'

Overall, we had tons of fun!