Merry Christmas

I've featured Joe Meno's Nativity before, but it's the best micro for the day. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Kurrendesänger

Kurrendesänger (here by Jojo) are either wandering carolers, or little wooden figurines of carolers found as decorations in German homes.

Twas the MOC before Christmas

From Tony Sava
Twas The MOC Before Christmas
When what on my wandering tracks should appear,
But a mini-scale coach, and eight tiny traindeer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than diesels his engines they came!
While they whistled, he shouted and called them by name:

"Now, Zephyr! now, Memphis! now, Empire and Bullet!
On, Comet! on, Chieftain! on, Daylight and Rocket!
To the end of the line! Slip the brake and highball!
Now chug away! chug away! chug away all!"

Kepler

Adrian Florea made this great scene.

Let's go for a drive

V&A Steamworks has an ongoing Cabinet of Curiosities project, where he invites other AFOLs to contribute small MOCs to a group display. Tim Gould made this great car.

No island is a man

V&A Steamworks has an ongoing Cabinet of Curiosities project, where he invites other AFOLs to contribute small MOCs to a group display. Chris Edwards made this amazing island.

Dino Bowling

Adam Meyers is going dino bowling.

Berzerk

Appollo keeps posting great BSG-inspired MOCs, like the Battlestar Berzerk.

Advent Calendar

Over on FBTB they've posted a review of the first half of the 7958 Star Wars Advent Calendar. This looks like a pretty great set to me, you get eight figs (six if you don't count droids), including the new, and quite fun, Yoda Claus. Relevant to this blog, though, is the series of great little microscale ships. My favorite is probably the Slave 1.

Pisa

Gabriel Riutort built a nice Pisa MOC to the micropolis standard.

Castles galore

There were so many wonderful entries in the Mini Castle Contest. I want to go back and look at some other in addition to the great winning entries I've already noted.

Knight Eklund's Cliffport Castle has a really beautiful sweeping coastline. I really like the color scheme and the variation in slope pitches from the upper plateau down to the beach. The castle itself is great with a non-square shape. I assume that most of the objects are held on by gravity, which is a liability of using the SNOT base. Another minor liability of the SNOT base is that it makes everything so unnaturally flat. Of course, at this scale, studs make fairly large hills, so maybe flat is better.


Ru Corder's Countryside Keep is also on a SNOT base, with the same advantages and disadvantages noted above. The wall made of brown rods is outstanding, as is the sandwiching of grill plates to make small windows in the main keep. I also really like the tree design using flower stems. Oh, and the use of log bricks to make plowed fields is another great piece usage.

LEGO Ideas Book

If you're looking for a great gift for the AFOL in your life, check out the DK LEGO Ideas Book (hmm, good sale price on Amazon). Anyway, this includes a large number of models by AFOLs you may know, like several of Debrah Higdon's micro models.

Mini Castle Contest

I apologize for being away from blogging for three weeks. Anyway, in the meantime, the winners were announced in the Mini Castle Contest. And the winner is ... Blego7's Warscape Volume 2, and second place went to the related Warscape Volume 1 by Siercon and Coral. While there were a lot of great entries, and I'll go back and look at some of those in future posts, these three builders really raised the bar by building a series of connected MOCs that all work together to tell an epic story.

Micro fleet is getting bigger

CommanderHawk's micro fleet is getting bigger. (Previous post here.)

Centre Pompidou

Theolego made the Pompidou Center.

WWII

Henning Birkeland made this great airport and planes.

One Penn Plaza

I don't know who 'moctown' is, but they just posted three great landmarks - One Penn Plaza, the Metlife building, and the leaning tower of Pisa.

Monster mash

There's so much to admire in lisqr's monster battle: the scale mixing, the great Japanese castle, the tree design, and that rainy backdrop.

Happy Halloween

The Mini Castle Contest finishes up today on CC. More on that later. For today, I thought Lolino's entry Tartarus had a sufficiently spooky feel to celebrate the day.

Oh Canada

Thadjantzi has made six great Vancouver landmarks.

Warscape Volume 1

Mini Castle Contest VII continues to inspire great MOCs. Siercon and Coral made an amazing series of eight separate scenes, each of which could be a post all by themselves, but tell a whole story and fit together to make Warscape Volume 1. More on Volume 2 in the near future ...

Failed?

Walter boy calls this a failed attempt at forced perspective. Maybe, but that castle is pretty cool.

Love, exciting and new, come aboard, we're expecting you!

CharityBuzz is holding an auction, with the proceeds to benefit Gabrielle's Angel Foundation for Cancer Research. Anyway, they are featuring Love to the Rescue, which is essentially a bejewelled version of set 10155, the microscale Maersk container ship. This artist has done several other sculptures where they took LEGO, plated the bricks with gold, silver etc, and then added jewels and crystals to get a fairly stunning result. If you've got a spare $5000 burning a hole in your pocket you can place a bid right now.

Soyuz spacecraft

Pascal Schmidt (Flickr user Pasukaru76) put together a micro Soyuz spacecraft. For comparison, here's a photo of the real thing.

Nano Hogwarts

We've featured a microscale Hogwarts before, but this one from Stacy Sterling is remarkably smaller, while still quite recognizable. Stacy writes that it was created for Guy Himber's Cabinet of Curiosities.

For a better view of the tiny objects in the Wunderkammer, check out this photo, which includes notes about the builders who contributed to the project.

City

This gorgeous cityscape was on display at BrickCon. Anyone know the builder?

Trains!

These wonderful trains by James Matthes were at BrickCon.

Unity Temple

GW Scholbrock, known as The Brick Sho on flickr, presented Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple at BrickCon.

Globe

Lego.Skrysston made the Globe Arena in Stockholm. Be sure to check out how this was constructed.

Mini Castle VII

Over on Classic-Castle it's that time again: Mini Castle VII is being run this year by forum member Wobnam, as previous contest administrator Robin Hood is now busy with college. Try your hand and win cool prizes. This was only announce a couple of days ago, and we've already seen three entries, including Subix' rendition of the Slovenian castle Sneznik.

10230 Mini Modulars

10230 Mini Modulars will be released in 2012. More details and photos here and here.

University of Derby

Clare Currie and Luke Dolman made the University of Derby, where they both work. They made this for a contest at LEGO Fan Weekend starting today in Denmark. Good luck, guys!

Into the valley of death

Brickdoctor has this great mission 10.2.

Set 3300005 - Copenhagen

Set 3300005 - Copenhagen was an exclusive offering at the grand opening of a LEGO store in (of all places) Copenhagen this past March. Nori-gallery has pictures showing all sides, the packaging, etc. This is an impressive little set. They've gotten more elaborate with these store opening offerings, and even include unique elements in this set. At least according to Bricklink those printed bricks are exclusive to this set.



Purchase this set and see an inventory on Bricklink.

Viking Ship Hall

Anne Mette Vestergard made the Danish museum Viking Ship Hall.

Gotcha!

Gotcha! by Karf Oohlu

Cathedral

Lolino made this wonderful cathedral.

Back to Taiwan

RMingTW built the Grand Hotel in Taipei.

9-11 memorial

This 9-11 memorial is the TexLug display this month at the Stonebriar LEGO store, built by members Corey and Dave.

Ten years ago today ...

I really debated what to post today. Some time ago Todd Webb made a stunning rendition of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, but for today I'd rather remember it as it stood in happier times, here by Spencer Rezkalla (btw, Sean Kenney was really the early builder to make New York landmarks, but his photos from 2000 are pretty poor quality)). Spencer also looked ahead to the rebuilt WTC.




BTW, I looked around for a good LEGO version of the Pentagon, but couldn't find one. Having lived in the DC area for five years and driven past it every day, it seems like such an obvious build. Of course, the angles involved would be an interesting challenge given the inherent shapes of LEGO.

Taiwan

LEGO recently displayed a map of Taiwan in a mall (in Taipei?) full of landmarks like this (hmm, I thought it was the national theater, but re-looking at pictures now I'm not sure - could someone who knows anything about Taiwan help me here?) and other scenes like this bridge and this shipyard.
Edit - Thank you to Aimless Pursuits, who pointed out in the comment that the first building is Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.