Red-white-black thingies

 The last few days before the convention, I learned that I would have an entire table just for myself. I had a panic, decided I needed to make as much as possible, and started copying stuff I had done before. This is one I copied from before.

Here's the album that has the previous attempts.

It turns out that those cheese slopes are fiddly and need to be placed in a certain way. Here is a close up of the way that worked. I had to take care to copy it correctly. If a cheese slope gets put in backwards, it gets very cranky.

Here's another copy of stuff from long ago:

Here is the pattern in the past.

And here are the two at the convention:

Kind of a mirror, kind of not. And laying the one flat had the bonus points of taking up more table space. ☺

Angled slopey thing

 

I think this was the first thing I made for the convention. The first thing put into a 16x16 pattern square block. I realized after the fact I'd made something very similar before, but oh well. 

I stuck those ball joint pins in there to fill a gap and to maybe add a decorative flair. Which makes me wonder: what all could be added in? Probably just about everything.

I really need to figure out how to adjust photos on the PC in the same way I can on a scanner. Hmmm.

Here it is at the convention:

And here is how the whole quilt-block connection thing was supposed to work. I think I originally wanted to get 9 to make a 3x3 square but plans changed.

Dots!

Dots are so much fun! There's so much to do with them. I'm just getting started with learning about all the possibilities.  

These first two I made as "quilt squares" for my original idea of having a quilt-like pattern sampler for the convention. The rest are table scraps. I could make endless amounts of table scraps.

Look how those pink quarter-circle dots fit onto studs that are partially obstructed! A full circle wouldn't fit there. So many possibilities. 

So much to play with....

Someone at the convention showed me that photo of the LEGO quilt at the Omaha (?) convention. 

Look! 

I think that would be very doable. Maybe someday. 

Travis Brick Stained Glass Window

 Here's one of the two stained-glass patterns I made in a rush for the convention:

I'm not sure how this came to be either? I was supposed to be doing other things that never actually got finished. But suddenly I loved the idea of having small dots being different colors than the surrounding window. 

It looked okay when lit up at the convention. A lot of kids ooh-ed and ah-ed. The convention had no electric outlets I could use, so I searched my house frantically until I found something battery-powered that would work passably well, an old light-up blue tooth speaker.

Here it is at the convention. I really wished I'd had my plug-in light.

The light I wished I could have used:

I ran out of time, but I have all sorts of ideas that I think would be fun to work on. A LEGO Lite Brite seems like it would be pretty easy to do. 

Oh look, someone made one already. (I am pretty sure that everything has already been made before.)

https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/d8d563c5-3420-45c7-85e0-5c896ba61f6b

I think that twisting the Travis bricks would be fun:

I wish I'd thought of that BEFORE going to the convention. But that was a huge rush.

Here's what it looks like underneath:

It would be so much fun to experiment with different color patterns and see what pops up. Might be easier to experiment with by printing out a black and white copy and coloring it in. 

Here was an experiment with angling the Travis bricks different ways. I liked the idea of having the colored bits be in rectangles pointing in different directions, but overall I don't think it makes much of an impact.

I wonder about all sorts of different options with colors... I'll have to get back to it sometime. Here's a tablescrap to help me remember some things I want to fiddle with:

You could mess with the color of studs and tiles and bricks and maybe dots. It would probably work best in stained glass, but opaque could be fun too? And now I need to make a list of all parts that have holes in them that could let light through. I actually need to make quite a few reference lists of parts, especially with all these new ones coming out in the last decade or so. It might help the info to stay in my head and not slide out my ear. That seems to be happening a lot more as I get older. 

One last thing:

Looking at the original from the convention at a certain angle made a certain pattern that I really liked. Let's see if I can get a photo to capture it.

Close enough!

This was another "quilt square", a pattern built on a 16 x16 plate with technic bricks on the side so that I could pin it to other squares. But in the end I didn't connect them, but left them separate in order to take up more space on the convention table. 

In the kitchen. Please forgive the window. It is permanently stained from irrigation water hitting it:

The Purple Thingy

 The Purple Thingy

I want to write down notes about the things I made for the convention. 

Here is the one I am currently calling "The Purple Thingy".

That photo above used AI to turn the background all to black. It's been awhile since I've edited photos. What do people think about manipulating photos like that? 

(This pattern came to an accidental premature end. So no better photos will be forthcoming.)

Here's the original. Not that different:

Well, to be fair, that might not even be the original. I think I took the photo in Microsoft Lens and had it straighten it into a perfect square. (Apparently Lens is being discontinued in favor of something else. I am not happy.)

Or this one. I'm so out of practice of knowing what looks right.

I was trying to make something else, of course. And in the process started playing with plates with rods on them, and those are really fun!

And then it happened in stages:

With lots of confusion as to what I liked best:

(That last one has some various options going on in there.)

But then I really loved how these curved slopes perfectly fit:

And that's how we got to the end. Still not sure if I like it very well. But I do love how those white curved slopes fit into the circle made by the black plates with rods. And how the purple 1x2 plates fit exactly into the black and white ring of plates. 

My original plan for the convention was just to make little quilt squares, 16x16 each, and hook them all together with pins. Which is why this is on a 16x16 plate. The other quilt squares fit their frames better. For this one, I had to swap out the bricks for some panels in the middle of each side. It still had the side holes to hook to the next quilt square with pins, so I figured it was fine. You can see it here. And how the design stays even when tilted. It helps that everything is two studs deep. Gives it more stability.

Here's the general idea of how the quilt squares were going to fit together:

But then I found out I had to fill up a whole table all by myself, and needed to spread everything out to take up as much space as possible. So here's the final result at the convention:

While I was photographing it after the fact, I had a dumb little moment where I forgot there was a big gap in the back of the patio chair.

Whoops! Rest in peace, purple thingy.

Brick Convention Pasco 2025 Part ONE

Life happens: new jobs, new babies, new houses, new hobbies that require less space..... and suddenly it's been over a decade since I've built anything with LEGO. I bought sets, organized the collection, wrote a thing or two. But making stuff gets intimidating when you haven't done it in awhile. And having been fairly successful the last go-round, I get anxious about trying again and not living up to expectations. 

Furthermore, MOCs have come a looooong way in the past 10+ years. Wow! I am sure that all the new pieces and colors help raise the level of creations across the board. But the community as a whole has stepped up its game. Techniques and styles develop and mature over time as builders keep stretching the limits of what is possible with tiny pieces of plastic. It's amazing to see, but also doesn't help the intimidation factor. I'm trying to remember how I even brought myself to post things the first time? 

It is easier to know what pushed me into building again this time: A LEGO convention came to town for the first time, taking place about a mile from my house. If I said 'no' to that, would I ever be able to live with myself again? It was a "Brick Convention", which apparently goes around to different towns and maybe comes back every year? 

[At the end I asked the guy (that's what I called him to myself: 'the guy', as in 'the guy in charge to whom I ask questions'--and now I wish I remembered his name) if they'd come back, and he seemed positive that they would, and that they would take up more of the arena floor space and have more room for local builders. Which... did they say no to some builders showing? Because there weren't that many there. But it was the first time and we could do better. We have a Facebook LEGO group uniting the in-town people now. We have advance notice. We could plan? I could plan. That requires being social. This is a topic for another essay.]

So I applied to show and they accepted me and in September I panicked. I told myself I didn't have to deal with it until the kids went back to school. But then it was September and the convention was October 11, and I had nothing built at all. I have always built small things and then taken them apart after photographing them. (Hey, LEGO is expensive and takes up a lot of space. If it was just me, this wouldn't be as much of a problem, but there's the family, and they seem to want space and money too. Weird, right?)

I went to BrickCon Seattle in 2011, 2012, and 2014. I only ever took tiny things with me. Small, unobtrusive, please-don't-look-at-me things. But for this new convention, the smallest amount of space I could request was an eight-foot long table. (These turned out to be six-feet long because the venue didn't have the right size, but still kind of big!) I had been hoping I could maybe just stick a tiny mosaic in the corner of someone else's table? Kind of hide, you know??? 

Also, it takes exponentially longer amounts of time to make bigger pattern mosaics. So I decided to just make samplers, small patterns on 16x16 baseplates. I made the walls out of technic bricks, so I could pin them together into one sort of quilt mosaic for presentation.(Like they do with quilts.) And to take up less space. So I made a bunch of those. And then about four days before the convention, I finally got info about the showing space (I seemed to have missed the email sent out in September). And something about the wording of it told me I'd have a whole table.... and then I panicked. I panic-built things by copying stuff I'd done years ago, as fast as possible, so that I could fill up more space. Then I realized I could display the books I've been published in, lay them out in front, and that would take up more room too. So phew! By the time the convention started, I had to squish a bit to fit it all on the table. 

Success!

Okay, I'm going to stop this post here or I'll dilly dally forever. I keep procrastinating posting things and building things I just need to get on with it!

BrickCon 2014

BrickCon 2014 returned to the Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington, for its 13^th year.  This year 470 convention attendees showed up with their models of all different shapes and sizes, from giant space needles and DUPLO orcas, to teeny-tiny replicas of actual models for the micro-BrickCon display.