Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published August 20, 2021. A lot of the community is predominantly focussed on the plastic parts that LEGO produces, but there are also numerous cloth-based items. Sails for ships/wings for dragons, netting/string, minifigure capes/skirts are probably obvious, but there are many others. There is a whole range of Primo cloth items for babies (in fact, enough of those are creature-based for their own article!); clothing/household items in Scala, Belville and Duplo; and, today’s topic: plush/soft toy editions of creatures. My current plushy collection. This is one of those areas on the edge of what is well-documented in the standard databases of BrickLink, Brickset and Brick Owl. It is much harder to know what exists and therefore what you are collecting/searching for. Added to that, information on the things you do find is more limited. In short, there are a lot of unknown unknowns. It is...

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published August 16, 2022. To help preserve some of the best LEGO content from the community, today we are pleased to share a guest article from Katie Walker who walks us through the evolution of a cheese slope mosaic. Katie was originally one of the main contributors at MosaicBricks, a LEGO blog started by Casey McCoy that ended in 2014. Flash MOC A few years ago, Sean and Steph Mayo came up with the idea of having a "Flash MOC". It's like a Flash Mob but with LEGO models instead where a bunch of models would show up all at once and all following a similar theme. One of these “Flash MOC” ideas was to have a fantasy world filled with polar bear warriors. You can see the results of the group collaboration, including the storyline, in the Urtican Blitz'ard group on Flickr. For my...

The LEGO Group has always been known for high quality customer service. In the rare case when a set is missing a piece, they’ll sent you a replacement. If you break a piece, they’ll send you a replacement. Today in the age of the internet, this process is mostly handled online with typical corporate anonymity. Sure, you can still call customer service and (eventually) speak to a real person that will give their first name. But there was a time when Susan Williams singlehandedly represented consumer services in North America. During the late 1970s to early 1990s, thousands and thousands of parents and children had the experience of receiving a personal reply from Susan. These letters from Susan were so meaningful to some customers that she would occasionally receive Valentine’s cards or Christmas cards from appreciative customers. Some children even carried on a multiyear correspondence with Susan! It was reported that...

Mc Heller Building by Max Braun - the original micropolis building August 17th is Micropolis Day! On this day in 2008, Max Braun first introduced the Micropolis concept to his local LUG, TwinLUG, and the standard was created. This year, 2023, marks the 15-year anniversary of the creation of the Micropolis standard. Inspired by the Utopolis Micro City work of Michel Labelle, as seen in Issue 2 of BrickJournal, Max wanted to create a standard that encouraged people to collaboratively build a micro-city. The Micropolis standard is based on four modules (16x16 studs) connected together to create a city block (32x32 studs). These are then connected to other modules or blocks to form a city. New parts and the introduction of lighting have seen some minor changes to the standard, but it is still recognisable in its current format. Details of the Micropolis standard can be found on the TwinLUG website....

One of the more anticipated sets for me this year are the LEGO Marvel Studios Collectible Minifigures Series 2 (71039) which introduces a new wave of characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The set releases on September 1 for $4.99 each and they include characters from Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, as well as my most hyped show, X-Men ’97. One of the new things that you’ll notice about the minifigures is that they are no longer in bags so you won’t be able to feel for the characters you want. For this wave and possibly for future Collectible Minifigures series, they’ll be in boxes. There’s really no foolproof way of figuring out which characters are in the boxes unless you open them up. If you decide to weigh them in stores, good luck with that as it’s frowned upon, similar to weighing sports card. Some big box stores are even putting...