Newsletter - October 2022
The summer has gone by in a flash this year, here we are in October planning our next tours out, some very exciting commissions and our tours into 2023 and 2024. We have certainly travelled a few miles over the summer, vans, trains, planes and ferries have helped us with our brilliant summer locations. We have had a blast and managed to squeeze in one of our favourite fan events too.
Sweetgreen commission
We don’t always build big things! I loved making this model. It was a surprise gift to one of the Sweetgreen Founders from his brother. A replica of their first location, on the corner of M and Bank in Washington DC, and standing outside, minifigure versions of the three Founders all smiles! You can see a few work-in-progress shots in our blog post.
Skaerbaek Fan Weekend 2022
It was absolutely fantastic to be back at the Skaerbaek LEGO Fan Weekend in Denmark this year. This is an annual meet-up for AFOLs from around the world where we show off our own creations, share knowledge and catch-up with friends. The opportunities to make new friends are myriad with 1,100 AFOLs from 35 countries in attendance.
This year many of us celebrated the 5th Anniversary of The LEGO House opening in Billund and we were treated to an incredibly special gift. We received the latest version of a LEGO duck. The duck has been an unofficial mascot of the LEGO Company since the 1950s and has appeared in numerous formats during that time. This year, it has been taken to a whole new level with a 3D-printed version of one of the original wooden, pull-along ducks that is the right size for a LEGO minifigure to hold.
And to make it even more incredible it has retained the functioning wheels and opening beak of those original toys! We are incredibly privileged to be part of LEGO’s continuing journey in giving the world an amazing toy. Huw Millington has written a great article about it on his website, Brickset, which you can find here.
Image courtesy of www.brickset.com
© Warren Elsmore Ltd
Exeter - Building the RAMM Building
Exeter through the ages - They say "better late than never" and in this case, it's been two years! This summer Brick by Brick opened in Exeter - an exhibition literally years in the making! Back in 2019, we started work on a series of special commissions for RAMM (Royal Albert Memorial Museum) in Exeter. The brief was to try and capture the history of Exeter throughout the ages in bricks. Starting with the Jurassic period, the exhibition travelled through time to the present, and then a glimpse of what Exeter might look like in the near future. The biggest model the RAMM building itself. Built as the name suggests in the Victorian period, it's a fantastic gothic structure. Arches, columns and all sorts of things make fantastic, but challenging buildings to do in LEGO. Creating a cut-away view complicated matters further but it was worth the effort.
Usually, we would post a short video of the build with a couple of camera angles, but we thought it would make a change to share the whole build process with you, including photography and delivery. It’s a good 15 minutes long, so make sure you’ve got yourself a nice cup of tea and a couple of biccies!
Our fleet
Over the summer we welcomed the newest member of our fleet - Miss Piggy!
Mia was a faithful workhorse but after 8 years of loyal surface, it was time to put her out to pasture. Miss Piggy is her replacement, maintaining our tail lift capabilities and making us fully low-loader-styled.
You might have seen Miss Piggy on our social streams already - she’s already racked up 3 trips up and down the country and there’s another one waiting to be completed next week too.
With our 3 other vehicles all being electric-powered, the obvious question is ‘why didn’t we buy an electric van?’ Sadly, although electric cars are certainly mainstream enough for our use (remember that Hamburg SUD ship we hand delivered 3 years ago - that went in the Tesla) the range of electric vans isn’t quite there yet for our purposes. Miss Piggy will almost certainly be our last diesel van though and to help reduce our carbon footprint we bought her second-hand. Having both more physical space and more load-carrying capacity, also means that we’ve been able to safely make deliveries that would previously have needed two vans - saving time and effort.
And finally…
This week we are starting to put the bricks together for one of the major projects we’re working on in the last quarter of this year. There has been a lot of planning, designing and colouring, and collating bricks and other materials. We’ll be charting this build as we progress, but we thought we’d give you a sneak peek at a little bit of it right now.
Care to hazard a guess as to what we’re building?
