Christmas Eve with Lego 10235 Winter Village Market Part 1

Alright,  with the Advent Calendar all opened up means we are now at the doorsteps of Christmas. Now I will be starting on the Winter Village Market. As most of us know, usually Singapore is several weeks late in receiving these sets often. This set was of no exception. Of course with enough moolah, one could have gotten it off eBay or something but I was not willing to pay a premium. So usually I end up buying these seasonal sets pretty late.As a result, I usually build them one edition behind!

Gund looks pleased that I am adding this set into my existing Winter Village sets and I am inclined to agree. This set simply looks great. It has all my favourite colours in it, Dark Red? Check. Dark Blue? Check. Dark Green? Check. Tan? Of course!

Wow. If Lego was trying to blow my mind about how awesomely they can colour coordinate a set, they succeeded easily with this treat.

Opening the box, we see the manual is nicely protected with the cardboard backing we have come to see in all more exclusive sets. The 2 large white plates are unprotected. For some reason Lego is confident the damage sustained by such pieces is minuscule during shipping and transport. Why? No idea, go figure.

Next up is a close up on the stickers. Reason I did this is because they are so shiny.

Time is running short though and I got to rush for a Christmas Eve dinner with a close friend of mine. Hopefully I can finish this by tomorrow morning. This has to wait. Tempting though it is to try and rush it, I shall resist.

Advent Calendar Day 24

Last piece of the Advent Calender! Yes it is of course a Santa.

A cursory glance from moi seems to give the impression that it is the same as the CMF 8 which is also similar to the Advent Calendar 2013 one.

That is great, I think Lego cannot possibly improve this dude any more. He has the nice beard, hat and that sack. Anything else would only marginally affect the overall design. I like this latest iteration and doubt it can be improved any further. But then again Lego has the darn knack of improving something to make sure we part willing part our money from our fists like zombies.

This year they gave old Santa a cookie and that is about it. Cosmetic difference. Overall I love this final piece. Now I got to go and rush the remaining Winter Village builds!

Advent Calendar Day 20, 21, 22 and 23

Okay decided to do the Advent Calendar 2013 together with the last few days of 2014 ones. Overall builds are quite meh this time round but one stand out for me is the nice tricycle. Simple build but quite unique.

Combing the 2013 pieces with the 2014 ones makes a riot of colours but a good portion of it is red in keeping with the Christmasy colour theme. Not many rare accessories this time round, oh well seems that the end of the advent calendar is not really going on a high note.

So one more build for tomorrow! It is usually the Santa so let's see what tomorrow brings...

Advent Calendar Day 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19

Decided to try and combine multiple advent sets to build. One is I am getting a bit lazy haha the other is that it does look better when several of them are built together

The sets policeman and his sled will certainly come useful to countering that Christmas time robber. Extra set of handcuffs seems to be a normal whenever we get a policeman. The sled is simple but decent. The nicer advent builds are the dog and turkey. Ever since the dog mould was introduced, we seem to be seeing more of them in police sets and all. I wonder which is more common now, the cats or the dog. The full turkey piece is a rather rare addition so it is a nice addition.

As for the Winter Village builds, I like igloo build because that is one of the more unique pieces. The other is the lamposts which seem to be a regular feature in Winter Village sets but rare outside these sets and modular.

Almost done with with my existing Winter Village sets, cannot wait to start on the new sets. We are less than a week from the Big Day so hopefully I can make it in time!

Advent Calendar Day 14

Yeah it is the weekend, time go get this going!

And we are given an anticlimax almost immediately. A sled. Yes obligatory since 'tis the season. But really tiny build. Oh well.

This 2013 Limited Edition set is pretty nice. The colour combination is great between the dark red roof, than wall and reddish-brown windows. Even better are the 3 nice small pine tree that came with it. The only thing I feel is that why not just 1 large pine tree and 2 small ones.

Now that I look at this, I wonder if I should go get the cousin of this, the 40083 one too....

Advent Calendar Day 12 & 13

Okay I must admit that building a set a day is not easy for me.

But seeing a very set get build up and displayed is certainly rewarding. Let us look at the 2 Advent pieces first. The wooden duck set is a tribute to the roots of Lego which actually started with the company making wooden toys first. The other set is the almost obligatory robber from Lego City. These 2 are so so, just fillers for the Advent Calendar.

The bakery and the snowplough vehicle are certainly the builds that take up more effort on my part but also are much more rewarding. The bakery has a lot of food accessories in it but too bad the set did not contain extra spares. Overall a fantastic build with nice dark red ties mixed without some nougat brown pieces. Quite a rare combo.

The snowplough vehicle has a very nice colour scheme as well, it contains 2 of the many favourite colours that I like from Lego, tan and dark blue. The unique part of this set is the detachable plough in the front. It is able to move in certain degrees of freedom as well or it can be removed to be like a normal truck.

I look at my box and see that only 1 building is left and less than half a dozen small builds left. That is great, look forward to completing them, then moving on to the 2 new sets I bought and finally add spare pieces to join them all up.

Advent Calendar Day 11

Yeah did another build today together with the Advent Calendar piece.

Although the policeman seems quite mediocre, he is compensated by having a printed tile! So that makes him at least slightly above average compared to the other pieces in the Advent Calendar. He is quite funny singing with his loudhailer.

The set he is together with is a "limited edition" set that I managed to snag from a guy I purchased off eBay. Met him at Woodlands or Admiralty MRT. Quite a long way to go for Lego and was my 3rd time that I went that far. The first time was for the Grand Emporium and the second time was for multiple units of Springtime scene.

Among the small Christmas sets/builds, this lists among the top or is the top. I like it for the horse and the guy whipping the horse away. The horse whipper I feel has an uncommon face which looks very senior indeed. The lamp post is the other piece that is equally uncommon and looks great. In fact, if could I would make more scenes with nice Victorian looking lamp posts.

Advent Calendar Day 9 & 10

Yeah kind of slipped behind yesterday, was too tired and KOed on my bed. Oh well, just build more Advent pieces this time round.

I must say that when building the 10th Advent set, I recall the words that someone uttered about Magic cards which I think holds true here. But more on that later, we first do the 9th day one.

As I said previously, we can always do with more accessories. The 9th one gives a baguette, the rest are fillers mostly. Half a chest to act as a cart. Meh. Give me more baguettes I say!

Now coming back to the 10th Advent build, I think Lego make not so good sets so that we can have great sets to compare it to! This snowball lobbing device is pretty "meh" since there are probably dozens of sets that already feature some variant of it. To add insult to injury, the range of these lobbing devices is pretty lousy too.

Overall, one good, one bad. Hopefully that ratio improves over the next few days.

Advent Calendar Day 8

Day 8 presents a female child holding an extra skate. Overall not too bad but just that the prints on here are dime a dozen in Lego City.

Fixed up the gazebo together as well and I must say this build is my favourite among all the small builds in the Winter Village series as it uses quite unusual parts to construct. Also, there aren't that many angular parts in the whole build itself. This make the whole build more natural looking to me.

Hopefully we get other more exciting parts in the other Advent Calendar pieces.

Advent Calender Day 7

Gund Bear wants to observe those tiny winny Lego Minifigures.

Day 7 makes me half happy and half disappointed.I am happy to see more accessories! But why do we keep getting these wall segment parts? Also, they have a tendency to keep using windows make such builds strange. I mean if they eventually give different parts of a house, it would be quite awesome to assemble a house after buy like a couple of Advent Calendars. They do not though, so all we will end up after buying multiple years of Advent Calendar will be half finished homes I guess.

Weekend have allowed me to catch up a bit and build the postal van and a shed and it was great. One thing is when I spend more time doing these builds, I will spend more time at home and less time outside. Which indirectly means I will spend less money hopefully! Let us see how this goes until Christmas.

Advent Calender Day 6

A little late on this one because last night I spent a bit of time catching with an old friend.

The toy surprise today is a cart of veggies and fruit. One can never have enough of these kinds of accessories. I hope the rest of the Advent Calender will have more such things. I feel that we need more accessories in our Lego sets. I think no one can dare to say we can do with less of these stuff that makes our sets more fun.

It was quite a productive day and I had managed to build the post office along the way. The Winter Village is being set up quite well I must say and maybe a couple of days later I will post a shot of how it looks like. Until then, I look forward to the other small builds found in the Advent Calender and hope for more accessories.

Advent Calender Day 5

Bah, another run of the mill minifgure although the croissant she is holding is certainly a nice addition as I do not have too many of them.

Together with her, I built the horse drawn cart which includes a large pint tree. I feel more large pine trees should appear in more Winter Village sets. After all it is Christmas no? We should litter the landscape with them.

Overall, an average build tonight, we shall see how it goes over the weekend. I guess I would stick to small non-building builds on the weekdays and leave the bigger buildings  build for the weekends. Let us see how that goes.

Advent Calender Day 4

Alright, the next piece is certainly an improvement I feel over the snowman. This time we get yellow cups which are quite common but we get also quite a nice pie piece.

Together with the Day 4 piece, only managed to build the Christmas tree with the assortment of present at the feet. Although not that big a build, what I do like about this is how the angles of each layer of the tree is angled quite nice to really make the tree look conical. Not an easy feat I feel.

Overall quite a pleasant build that adds on to the winter village quite nicely. The building experience is quite different from a building so it is certainly a welcome on.

Weekend is just round the corner! I hope to make more builds and catch up.

Starting the Winter Village Builds

Managed to squeeze in a bit more time today to start on some Winter Village builds. Here is a shoot of how I packed them last year. They should still be in good condition.

For day 3, the Advent Calendar contain a snowman. This time the build is reduced to very few part. Nothing remarkable about it.

Randomly selected, I chose a frozen lake and a toy shop.

Have not decided when I would start on new builds from the Winter Village Market or Santa's Work shop. Maybe in between rebuilding my current sets would be good.

Christmas is round the corner...again!

Wow, it is that time of the year again. I have once again gone to buy the Lego City Advent Calender. This time it is the 2014 edition. Although I am a bit of a Star Wars fan, I somehow cannot find it in me to go and get the Lego Star Wars one.

Anyway this year I am starting slow and have not starting assembly any of the Winter Villages yet! I better speed up during the weekends and all. As you can see below, the back drop given is usually not bad at all.

I am a little late this time so I went ahead and opened the first 2 compartments. The first one had nothing remarkable, just some random shorty haha!

The second one is slightly better, we get a letterbox but even then it is quite common, but not a common as shorty. A winter village/town is slowly forming up.

Aright, that wraps it up for today. Let us see if I can do the Advent Calender and a Winter Village set tomorrow.

Goodbye Naughty 3 Dec 2007 - 18 Jun 2014

Nothing much to say really, except that he is gone. Quite fast too. Here are some nice random pics of him.

catch you around someday

Rabbit galloping

Was playing with the DSLR when the rabbit was captured looking like it was galloping. He probably was having fun tearing around the garden. He does look a bit like a horse doesn't he?

Lego 75032 Microfighters X-Wing Fighter

This is a fun build and a impulse buy for me. It is done is some Chibi style and among all of the current wave, I think this is the most cute and cool one.

The build was quick and easy and one of the nice part about is is that it can switch between flight mode and attack mode just like the "real" X-Wings.

Looking at the rear you can see the astromech's head. The full droid is not given in this set and is understandable given how small the build is, no way you can put one in.

Overall, a fun impulse buy which I intend to put on top of my Lego 10188 Death Star as it make its attack run on it. Is it worth getting the others? I think this Microfighters is either you like it or not, no 2 ways about it. Each Microfighter build and design is radically different from what a standard Lego Star Wars set would be hence I do not think it is for everyone.

Lego 75034 Death Star Troopers

I had been waiting for the Metro Sale to get this on a 20% discount off retail price but in the end I could not wait. If you have the Lego 10188 Death Star, then I think this would be a nice addition to the set as it features the 2 imperial baddies that you want to get loads of to make armies other than the stormtroopers.

I know that it shoes the funny looking big gun artillery in there but really this is just an army builder set and the gun piece is just some filler. The new blaster piece will be an interesting thing to look at later and is set to be put into the little hand of every army-like unit in the Lego world.

Like all small sets, it comes with an instruction pamphlet and couple of polybags, one for small parts, the other for the rest. As you can see they gave plenty of the trans red round 1x1 pieces for the blasters as they are confident that children will lose some of them. We shall see if their confidence is misplaced or not.

The Lego Star Wars logo for this wave feature Darth Vader reaching out to touch someone. Very weird..."Luke, I am your father" perhaps is what he is trying to express?

Here is a shot of the set when fully assembled. Notice that the royal guards have capes with 2 colours, a darker red inner side and the bright red one on the outside. Other than that, the royal guards are pretty much okay.

Okay so really this is a battle pack set so the main focus for most people would be the 4 minifigures but honestly it feels like Lego is not even trying...the flick fire feature seriously needs to be upgraded and replaced to those new 2014 spring firing mechanisms pronto. The flick fire for this case can barely fly past the cannons below it. Overall the part in it are not that interesting either.

As for the Death Star gunners, the nice part is that they come with 2 different faces instead of looking like twins.

Upon closer inspection, one will notice the helmets have a red and a blue dot on the left side of the helmet which can easily go unnoticed. Not sure if that denotes a rank or is just some LED light blinking on the helmet side. If it is just LEDs, one wonder why they would need it...

The new blasters were tested and yes, the shooting pieces shoot quite well though the blasters look quite bulky which I think is pretty much unavoidable as 1x1 round plates are already at one stud size. They do look like they are carrying speed guns though which is quite funny.

Overall the set is average and is a good addition for anyone with the Lego 10188 Death Star, which was the primary reason for me getting it. If you do not have the Death Star, I think you can skip this battle pack without missing much.

Lego 70804 Ice Cream Machine

I have succumbed and bought my first The LEGO Movie set. Hopefully it will be my last too. It is none other than the Ice Cream Machine. This set is a 2-in-1 build and for me, I bought it more for the alternate build of the ice cream truck. It simply looks great and is definitely much more well designed I feel than other regular Lego City sets. If you have not caught the Lego Movie, have no fear, this set appears like probably all of 30 seconds or less in the movie and hence the show will have no real impact on whether you want to get this set or not.

This time instead of a small box with some silly object being selected to show the 1:1 scale, they have decide to go with all the minifigs available in this set. Honestly, I doubt anyone would remember those 3 folks names, even after the movie is out.

Here are all the parts that came with the set. 2 instruction manuals for the first build and the 3rd one for the ice cream truck alternate build.

Here is a 3/4 view shot of it. Look great does it not?

Next I will just quickly run through the parts I find interesting and some stuff which I find are a bit of a bummer but overall does not penalise the set in any major way.

First the giant ice cream cone. Surely it must rate as the coolest piece on this set.

Next up, that is the ice cream cone scoop pieces, Bricklink part 6254. In this set you get a total of 4 colours. 2 which are common, white and the bright light orange. The other 2 are less common, lime and dark azure. This is definitely another cool factor, after all who does not like ice cream?

One of the slight negative is that unlike normal Lego City sets, this vehicle does not have doors. Also it is elevated quite high up hand if you see, from this picture, the part where the white board is, is almost neck height of a minifig.

Looking inside, there are 2 ice cream dispensers and a lime green ice cream cone there which I think is a nice interior piece.

Finally, another slight negative is that the set relies on quite a fair number of stickers to make it an ice cream truck. Would have been fantastic if they were printed but we know it is not going to happen in the near future.

Oh well, 2 out of 5 being slightly negative is not bad at all. Overall I really like this set compared to other Lego City vehicles and think that the striking colours really fit this ice cream truck and would highly recommend it to those who want a vehicle to add something different to their already sizeable Lego City sets.

Lego 41027 Mia's Lemonade Stand

My first Friends set! Small cheapo set and I am sure I am not the only AFOL who is considering it even though we do not normally buy Friends sets.

I bought mainly because it has some very interesting parts but the main driver is mainly because of the scooter which looks like a Vespa! As for the Mia figurine, I will probably eBay it.

Here are the other parts which I think are a great addition to my current collection. From the left there is a printed cookie part, a transparent minifig head part, motorcycle helmet that is different from the stand Lego City one, the new inverted dome piece and finally a lighter medium dark flesh crate. All from a small SGD$20 set, of course I could not resist.

So let us have a close up on the 2 smaller pieces. The first is the printed cookie which looks like a chocolate chip. I must say that the 1x1 round tile is definitely getting very popular since its introduction and I think it can only grow. Printed parts to me are always a crowd pleaser, they can last a long time assuming one takes a good care of it.

Next is the helmet. Thankfully the Friend headgear is compatible to the standard minifig head. The funny thing with it is that the visor does not go fully down and covers up to the eyes only so bugs will still get to the mouth of  the rider.

Next up, more on the Vespa. With some small mods, it becomes compatible to a standard minifig. Looks fantastic if you ask me and is definitely a great addition to the existing molded bicycle I have. The peppermint green is very distinctive especially for me since I do not currently have any piece of this colour yet.

Finally here is the overall shot of the whole set. The part about Friend sets are that the accessories are almost always more and better than what we get from the City sets. I hope some spillover effect will take place over time. If not, you might see me actually buying more Friend sets in the future just for the accessories. Which the down side is, I will end up with some pretty bright colours which I will probably have to swap out to make them look normal with respect to the Lego City ones.

Overall, I am very happy with this set and will recommend it to anyone who like that Vespa. With eBay people selling it at SGD$16 bucks  or at that same price during a Metro 20% sale which happens very often throughout the year, what are you waiting for?