advent calendar

The Rambling Brick’s Advent-ure Day#6

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This year, we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the LEGO Advent Calendar, and the Rambling Brick is taking a trip back and forth through the history of Holiday themed sets, before looking at today’s offering from the LEGO Friends Advent Calendar.

In recent years, LEGO City, Friends and LEGO Star Wars have become evergreen Advent Calendar themes.  Over the next few days, I would like to take a look at some of the advent calendars that did not have the same level of long term appeal.  Today, I will start with the 6299 Pirates Advent Calendar.  This was released in 2009 – relatively recently in the scheme of things.

Enjoy 24 days of fun surprises with the 2009 LEGO Pirates Advent Calendar — no looting or pillaging required! With a new buildable character or setting every day, and lots of colorful minifigures, creatures and special elements, you can create your own LEGO Pirates world and play out swashbuckling adventures on the box-lid play mat. Each day open a new window in the specially designed Advent Calendar box! Includes 24 pirate-themed surprises in all, plus a play mat printed on the box lid! Includes 8 minifigures!

Text Source: LEGO.com via Brickset.com

The set came with eight minifigures and a number of creatures, including a crocodile, saw toothed shark, rat, parrot, crab and monkey.  In between, there were a number of minibuilds including a small cannon, some scenery, a treasure chest and raft.  Contemporary reviews are quite favourable, but do comment that there is not really any seasonal content included. Captain Brickbeard was opened up on day one, and I suspect if this calendar were to be produced today, he would have had a brightly wrapped present or sack, and a Santa hat! A full list of the minibuilds can be found on Bricklink, as this is from the days before shop.lego.com providing complete spoilers for the advent calendars.

This is the only Pirates Advent Calendar that we have seen to this day.  Perhaps it would be nice to see another, if Pirates make a return to the mainstream in the future.

Follow on after the break, to see today’s build from the 2018 Friends Advent Calendar.

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The Rambling Brick’s Advent-ure 2018 #4

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Today we continue our Advent-ure: 2018 is the 20th anniversary of the first LEGO Advent Calendar, which appeared in 1998.  In our the Rambling Brick’s Advent-ure, we travel through the years looking at different sets and themes which have been used over the years to celebrate the Christmas Holiday Season. And then, you can follow down to see what our Friends have in store in their Advent Calendar today.

Today, let us take a look at the Nutcracker 40254, distributed as a gift with purchase during Brick Friday 2017.  Nutcracker dolls originated in Germany in the seventeenth century, and became associated with Christmas through Hoffman’s story “The Mouse and the Nutcracker” which is set around the time of a household Christmas Party.  The story was popularised through Tchaikovsky’s ballet adaptation, which has become a seasonal favourite over the year.

The 2017 Staff Gift: at 732 elements, it’s a bit bigger than 40254

The set has two hundred and thirty parts, and features an opening and closing jawbone, operated through a lever on its back.  As a relatively recent set, it should not set you back too much on the secondary market.  This version of the nutcracker makes great use of the warm gold/ pearl gold highlights.  The build was simple, and made good use of warm gold jumper plates.  This was not the only Nutcracker model released in 2017, with the annual staff gift also depicting a much taller nutcracker.  I quite like this set: it is small and effective, and achieved its goal of causing me to purchase a significant amount of LEGO at the time of the year.

I don’t know what drove me to want to discuss it this particular set today…

What Are Our Friends Up To?

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The Rambling Brick Advent-ure 2018 #1

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This year, we have celebrated a HUGE number of anniversaries associated with the LEGO Group. Sixty years of the LEGO Brick, Forty years of the Minifigure, Twenty years of Mindstorms and Ten years of Power Functions.

Regular readers will have followed my 40th anniversary of the minifigure covert celebration articles, and have come to realise that I am always happy to draw a long bow when it comes to searching for coincidences.  Imagine my joy when I discovered that this is also the twentieth anniversary of the first LEGO Advent Calendar: released in 1998.  And so my theme is set. In order to avoid perky spoiler photos of the Friends Advent Builds, I will start each post in this series with a brief presentation of one of the sets or themes  produced by the LEGO Group in the celebration of the Christmas Holiday season.

Can I find twenty four themes to fill the period of advent? Time will tell.

Brick Based Advent Calendar: 1298

This year’s LEGO Friends Calendar contains no minimills, and consists predominantly of  mini builds. However, this is not the first time a ‘mini build centric’ advent calendar has been released.

In 1998, the LEGO group released their first advent calendar. Set 1298 had 24 mini builds, in the style of older angular LEGO builds.  It would appear that there was no need for significant variations between the different builds, although we do see a variety of boats, planes, cars and creatures. The same Santa minifigure even appears twice!

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The Christmas build up keeps building up: day 15 (bonus content)

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‘So let you light so shine before men…’

So there is our cryptic clue, which Facebook may have spoiled for you. But there are many more examples of today’s build from recent year’s sets!

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Christmas Build Up: Day 7

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Today, we have been working at these little models for a week!

It’s been a Hoot! Continue reading →

Christmas Buildup: day 6

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As our buildup continues, today’s build is SNOT interesting.

In the best tradition of Christmas cracker riddles…

Q. What sort of bird is an insect? Continue reading →

Building Up While Scaling Down

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This is the third green and black steam train produced by the LEGO Group as part of a set over the last few years. Each has a different scale:

The first is  Emerald Express(31015), a creator three in one set from 2014. With six wheels and a green and red, almost Christmas like colour scheme, you may be forgiven for thinking it was intended to be a prototype for the holiday train.  One of the alternative builds is for a carriage in similar livery.

Our next train to consider is the Holiday train from 2016. This minifigure scale train is  transporting a Christmas tree that spins as the train moves.

Based on the color scheme, I presume that our micro build of the day is a micro scale version of the Emerald Express. Rather than a coal filled tender however, it appears to be transporting a couple of Christmas trees. Once again reminding us of the Holiday train.

This is a fantastic micro representation of a couple of trains presented in other scales in recent years. It’s simplicity is refreshing and you exactly what is supposed to be… which, after some of the brick built animals, is a little refreshing.

Play well!

Building Up a Solid Concept in Creature Construction

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Today we have another brick built creature. I am going to make the call, and declare it a cat …or a brushtail possum. But I don’t think it really matters. If there is one thing that the Christmas buildup 40222 has reminded me, it is that there is a need to use your imagination  when building with bricks. Lego city and minifigure scale is all very well when you have your creatures, pets and animals predefined with an independent mold, but to put things together from scratch, and to interpret what others have built takes a little imagination. Through the creatures that we have brick built with this set, we have seen a number of different techniques for building animal faces, years, posture, legs and tails.  I love the way that the eyes position here makes you think the cat(possum?) has a great big grin on its face!

Play well.

 Christmas Build up, Caught up

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Day 11: Tree-mendous

And so I am now presenting the Christmas Buildup 40333 in real time. Today we have a Christmas Tree.  I have had Christmas trees on my mind lately, due to a little side project at the scout group. So, lets review what we know:final-13

Built around a core of bricks with studs on 4 sides, with some 1×1 round plates to fill the gaps, this is an almost entirely SNOT  (Studs Not On Top) built tree.

 

New Christmas Tree designs are produced at a remarkable rate in LEGO® sets. Here are some of the highlights from Advent calendars. as well as other sets,  over the last few years (However,I won’t include those from 2016 because…spoilers.):

LEGO® City Advent Calendars:

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The Build-up Catch-up continues…

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Day 5:  Snow Business 

This terrific little snowplough may or may not have a new piece in it. According to brickset’s database, the bright yellow panel 1x2x1 with rounded corners, element ID 6146219,only appears in this set. However, bricklink lists the piece as 4865b and it seems to appear in 37 other sets in yellow.

Closer investigation reveals that these may in fact be element 486524 – essentially the same panel, in bright yellow (TLG) but with square corners. These may be the closest thing to the sole source of this element at present.  That or some online databases have become a little mixed up…

Snow ploughing and Christmas are a little incongruous in Australia. In Melbourne we are the grips of summer at Christmas time, but even in winter it virtually never snows here ( it did once, but that was over 30 years ago), and certainly not enough to justify a vehicle to clear it.  But it’s not all about me!


Day 6: Its beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Measuring 2x4x6 1/3, this little build is the epitome of Christmas Eve. The fire, mantelpiece and chimney, with plants and a hanging stocking, waiting for Santa. This is a near perfect build, with just 27 pieces.