A Wedding With a Little Touch of LEGO

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published June 2, 2022.

I’ll come clean: I love LEGO! No surprise there, I guess. But luckily, my partner—now wife—also likes LEGO enough to think it was a good idea to sprinkle a little bit of LEGO magic over our long-overdue, post-COVID wedding celebration. Here’s what we did!

Custom wedding cake! Oh, and a very happy bride and groom. Photo by Olan Malde

Those of you who are regular BrickNerd readers will know that my posts tend to be of the personal kind. For the most part, I write stories about things that have happened to me since I got back into LEGO about ten years ago. But this one is inevitably going to get even more personal than usual, because it’s about my wedding. And in order to get to that, I’ll have to tell you about my wife, Karen.

The Significant Other

Except for a couple of very short-term relationships, I had been single for years—well, pretty much all my life—when I met her through online dating in 2018. We both realised relatively early on that this was serious, and I knew I had to tell her about my nerdy hobby. The first time she visited me in my home town of Bergen, I gave her this:

“Dear Karen. I like you. Hugs, Are”

…she already knew about my LEGO addiction before that, but she really liked the rose, and considering what a big part of my life LEGO has become I was incredibly relieved when she first said that she thought having a hobby was healthy, and then told me she had very fond memories of playing with LEGO as a child. Admittedly, all of this was before she moved in with me and realised just how much LEGO I really own… but I have to say that even after that, she’s been very supportive!

I’ve gradually tried to lure her into the hobby, and although she hasn’t really ventured seriously into MOCing (yet) she builds the occasional set and enjoys it. We have one of the Warhol Marilyn Monroes on our living room wall, she helped me put together the minifigures for my contribution to the BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) exhibition in Copenhagen in 2019 (the story about that will follow later!), she’s got a LEGO phone cover with her name on it, made from DOTS pieces—and we’ve obviously visited LEGOLAND in Billund together.

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About a year after we first met, we went on holiday to the American Pacific West Coast, and while it wasn’t entirely by accident that our trip coincided with BrickCan in Vancouver, the main part of the vacation (I promise!) was spent driving along the coast from Seattle to San Francisco and visiting friends there. But one evening in Vancouver, Karen had gone back to the hotel room before me (this is when she explained that if you’re not into the LEGO hobby, there’s a limit to how long you can listen to people talking excitedly about how there’s now a new green version of the minifig backpack available at the BAM bins in the LEGO stores). I came back to the hotel room to find her like this:

And so it begins

The finished product, on display in our kitchen along with our BrickHeadz counterparts (yes, I know. But I had been in the sunshine a lot that summer!)

This is Karen building her first MOC, using parts from the event bag given to all attendees (I think she got one even though she wasn’t actually registered, thank you so much, John’s mom who took very good care of her!) to decorate one of those weird 2003 LEGO picture frames I bought from The Brick Chick in the convention hall.

Now, it’s tempting to grab a cheap point by claiming that this was the moment when I decided I had to marry her! It obviously wasn’t, I had actually planned to propose for a while, but I did just that nine days later, in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate, with San Francisco in the background:

And, would you believe it, she said yes!

The most eagle-eyed among you might be able to spot something unusual about that ring though…

The One Ring

I’m sure that those of you who have done this, will agree that buying a ring for your fiancée isn’t necessarily easy. If she doesn’t normally wear rings, it’s difficult to find out which size her ring finger is, and as this is something that she’ll hopefully be wearing for the rest of her life, you want to get her one that she really likes!

So I decided to buy a temporary engagement ring. That way, she could help pick the right one later, and it would be a fun little LEGO twist to the proposal. I found a seller on Etsy that had just what I wanted—not just a custom-made chromed ring, but also a little box to go with it.

The only problem was that, true to form, I was running late with this. I had known for a while exactly when and where I was going to propose, but I had been busy planning our annual LEGO event in Trondheim which was fast approaching, and I’d actually be going straight to Canada from Trondheim without going home first. The ring was located in the UK, so I was worried that it wouldn’t make it in time.

The dilemma was solved, as it so often is, by turning to one of my international LEGO friends for help. The Hairy Fairy, Kevin Gascoigne of Fairy Bricks, was flying to Trondheim for the event and agreed to act as courier. So the ring was shipped to him and handed over to me in Trondheim, and then I just had to hide it from Karen during our trip, until we reached the Golden Gate…

I should add that the ring turned out to be even more temporary than planned. Maybe not unsurprisingly, as Karen wore the ring all the time, the chrome started to wear off quite soon and expose the trans-green element underneath. So we didn’t wait very long before we replaced it with a more permanent (and slightly more expensive!) solution.

The Actual Wedding

Not very long after the engagement, we set a date for the wedding: August 15, 2020. But then, in March, a spiky little virus threw a whole lot of spanners in the works. While we were very relieved thad we hadn’t planned our wedding for March, so we had a few months to cancel everything, it was obviously a disappointment to have to postpone the celebrations indefinitely. We did, however, get married on the set date—and because there was a limit on 15 people getting together anywhere in Norway at the time, we mixed it up a bit: We asked a friend of ours, who is a priest, to marry us outdoors, in the hillside of Løvstakken overlooking Bergen.

Happiness.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day, with temperatures around 25°C (77°F) and not a cloud in sight, which is most certainly not a given in Bergen, the “rain capital of Norway”. It’s Seattle’s sister city for a reason! It was also a day completely free of LEGO. But we had other plans for the celebration… we just had to wait almost two years for that.

After one more false start—we initially re-scheduled for May 2021, but that also fell through—it finally became clear that May 21st this year would be sufficiently COVID free that we’d be able to host our wedding celebration with all the guests we originally wanted to invite. We decided to pretty much stick to the original plan, with a ceremony in the church where I grew up, and the party at the same venue where we originally booked.

This meant that I could finally start applying the finishing touches to the LEGO elements (see what I did there?) of the celebration. We didn’t want to go completely overboard, just sprinkle a bit of discreet magic, so we focused on three things: Table decorations, some small gifts to people who helped us on the day, and not least… the cake!

The Table Decorations

The logic detail to start with when it comes to table decorations felt like the place cards. LEGO-fying them seemed like an easy thing to do. I came up with the idea of making minifigure versions of the two of us, and then all the female guests would get a Karen and all the male guests an Are, placed on a modified 4x6 tile where I could write the guests’ names (yes, I did actually use a permanent marker on LEGO pieces).

Early prototype Karen minifig

But finding the perfect minifig body parts wasn’t necessarily easy. Karen used her mother’s wedding dress from 1975, just adapted a bit to make it look a little less dated, and most of the minifig brides released by LEGO have very elaborate dresses that don’t at all resemble Karen’s. So we decided to use the Ballerina’s torso from the Series 15 Collectible Minifigures from 2016. We needed around 40 of them though, so I spent quite a bit of time hunting for those among BrickLink sellers all over the world! In the end, I ended up with a mixture of loose torsos and complete minifigures (so if anybody needs a tutu or silver-laced legs, I can help).

I didn’t want to use the old-fashioned 65-degree 2x2x2 slope for a dress though, so when the new skirt piece became available in white in the Build-A-Minifigure stations a couple of years ago, I asked an employee at the LEGO Store at Copenhagen Airport very nicely if he would allow me to fill some of those blister packs with only skirt pieces. And when I explained what I was going to use them for, he was more than happy to oblige!

Then we found a face that Karen could identify with - but buying those heads in bigger numbers wasn’t without problems, either. I found a seller in Spain who had a lot of them—the issue was that when they arrived, some of them looked like this:

Hmmm. Not exactly what I ordered

The middle one is the one I ordered (BrickLink calls it 3626bpb0540). But there are so many similar designs released by LEGO that they’re getting almost impossible to separate, and the others here seem to be one-sided versions of 3626cpb1842—some of which have very bad printing. Now, obviously I could have let those tiny differences go… but I’m a perfectionist, so I replaced the ones that had the wrong printing. There’s obviously too much space between the eyes and the mouth…!

Putting together my figure was easier. The real me had bought a dark blue suit for the occasion, so I had to find a dark blue suit minifig torso. There were basically only four to choose from, none of which had a bowtie, so I knew I had to ignore that detail:

The left one has a very obvious orange tie and pinstripes, so I skipped that. And the one on the right hasn’t been in a set since 2008 and is priced accordingly… so my choice was between the two in the middle, which are actually identical save for the colour of the hands. I was going to use yellow hands anyway, so it didn’t really matter which one I went for—the nougat one is Obadiah Stane from Iron Man, and the reddish brown is Chip, from the recently retired Disney Train.

Seeing as Stane is a villain, obviously I immediately felt more at home with Chip… but it also helped that it was the most recently released figure, so it was easier to get 40 of those than any of the others. Then I just had to dismember the cute Disney squirrel… and start mass-producing all the figures we needed!

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Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Those workers in the middle picture were a humourous little touch to the table decorations. Karen had chosen candles and succulents (no, not the LEGO ones) for the tables, and my mother helped find some wild flowers. Then we added an army of 50-60 LEGO workers, featuring—incredibly—that ancient Town torso with blue overalls, which a German seller had in big numbers in new condition!

You can just make them out in the picture on the left, hammering, sawing, painting and generally applying the finishing touches (even though one in the picture is only carrying a boombox—there is a slacker at every construction site, right?) to the decorations.

The Thank You Gifts

Obviously, a whole lot of people helped us make this wedding party the lovely experience that it became, not least our parents and family. But some were asked to put in an extra little effort on the day, and we wanted to give them a little special souvenir. So in addition to some locally made fruit juice and jam, we put together some custom minifigures for them.

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The waiters all received modified versions of the Series 9 CMF Waiter. In the middle picture, we have our Master of Ceremonies (who didn’t really use a megaphone), our photographer (who took the picture of the table above, and the lovely picture of us at the bottom of this article), and Karen’s friend who helped her with the makeup. And finally, you can see the guy who played the organ in the church (Oscar Peterson for our entrance and Coldplay as we walked out!), our friend the priest (with a custom Citizen Brick torso), and the chef who served us a lovely barbecue meal.

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Above you can see some detail shots. Worth mentioning: The organ and stool is based on the ones from the real church, the mirror is a sticker that sadly refused to give a good reflection due to the uneven background, and finally: When handing over the minifig priest to the real one, we emphasised that the tile inside the Bible (click the picture above to enhance) is not meant as a post in the debate about whether what the book contains is true or not!

And Finally: The Cake

I’ve saved, literally, the best for last. As I’m writing this I’ve just finished the last slice of the wedding cake, and It. Was. Delicious. I’m a cake person, and my experience is that whenever I come across a very elaborately decorated cake at a party, it’s often been done by somebody who is very good at decorating, but not necessarily at baking.

A Google search to make your mouth water

Wanting to avoid that trap, and armed with some proper inspiration from online searches, we approached all the local bakeries in the area and asked if they’d care to make us a proper LEGO cake. Rather disappointingly, they all refused, saying that they all had wonderful standard wedding cakes… which we obviously didn’t want—if we did, we’d have asked for that!

But then we came across, on Facebook, of all places, a lady who makes spectacular cakes. And best of all, the feedback that her customers had left told us that the cakes didn’t just look great, they also tasted absolutely fantastic. We got in touch with her back in 2020, and she agreed to make us something special—and, thankfully, she is still in business after the pandemic!

The Karen and Are version of LEGO’s own cake-topper

She did tell us, however, that her sketching skills were terrible, and that she doesn’t have room for visitors in her kitchen so we couldn’t stop by to watch the progress (plus, she wouldn’t have had much to show until a couple of days before the party anyway). Wanting to use a modified version of LEGO’s own cake-topper set, we asked her to make the cake itself very simple, but to add some LEGO decoration on a small section—a bit less than 45 degrees—of the cake. That way, we could place the cake on the table first, and people would think that it was a regular cake… only for us to turn it around and reveal the great surprise! Then we basically sent her some pictures for inspiration… and took a leap of faith, just hoping she would deliver.

She did.

The day before our party, she sent us these pictures:

Left: What the guests would all see at first. Right: The coolest LEGO wedding cake ever! Photo by Mariannes kakepynt

We were over the moon with it, but when we actually laid eyes on it after Karen’s brother had nursed it the 170 twisting and turning kilometres (106 miles*) to the venue, it looked even more spectacular in the fle… eh, in the dough! You can see a video of the actual cake reveal here! And the taste… oh boy. We had no idea of just how much of a treat were in for at this point:

Cutting into the cake, all three mouth-watering dark and light chocolate cream layers of it. Photo by Kalle Punsvik

To us, this really was the, eh… icing on the cake, excuse the lame pun. It just added the final touch to the LEGO-fying of our wedding celebration, that I think we managed to pull off without going over the top or becoming tacky. And even the more style-minded people among our guests seemed to agree, judging by how many people commented on the table decorations and that spectacular (and delicious, yum!) cake.

So that’s the story of our overdue wedding celebration. We are currently living happily ever after… but on a final note, I must admit that our living room is probably a bit too influenced by my hobby at the moment. At least if you ask Karen—and I don’t entirely disagree. This has to do with the fact that she moved into my apartment and not the opposite, and it will likely change when we, in a year or two, will probably buy and move into a house together. She is informing me, though, that I am currently looking at real estate from the perspective of a LEGO collector (“where is the potential LEGO room?”), which is apparently a very special pair of tinted glasses. But that might be a story for another time!

*He was wearing sunglasses, but thankfully it wasn’t dark, and he had a fully charged battery instead of a full tank of gas. Oh, and he doesn’t smoke. Good for the cake.

Not the worst day to pick for taking wedding photos. Shot by Kalle Punsvik

Do you generally get along well with your Non-LEGO Significant Other, or is there something stressing the parts…? Have you applied the LEGO touch to a special occasion in your life? Did you get the obscure Blues Brothers reference? Or maybe you were just incredibly tempted by that gorgeous wedding cake? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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