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. 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!