"Sometimes brightening up the outside of your store is just the thing to perk up business, yes?"

Day 126:

Conversation in the house recently has been heavy on the Animal Crossing. Since picking up a copy of New horizons a couple of weeks ago Opeie has been busy building his island and creating and it has been so much nicer hearing about that rather than Fortnite. While he was having a chat with his friends yesterday I decided to build him Nooks Cranny. His smile when he came off the phone and saw it was contagious and leaving the build empty means that that smile can continue tomorrow when we are building the furniture together. Another win for those amazing bricks.

"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness."

Yesterday marked the day of our friends Gareth and Vikki's wedding. Although I don't know them both that well, I get the feeling they are big kids like me. Gareth is a big fan of the Aquaman phone cover I made a few months back so I decided to make them a Lego themed wedding gift. I love a challenge and it was something to keep me occupied. Like anything we build together the first step is to find an empty container and look for pieces that 'may' come in handy...

I had an idea for a decorative box that opened up with the bride and groom inside. I picked white and pink as a colour scheme and started building but it looked overly femanine. I then changed the pink to red but a bow we made crossing the box looked like the st George's cross (not great for a wedding). I was getting stressed out at this point but then Seth suggested I change the red to yellow as he said he liked it on my original phone cover (always good to have Seths opinion on these things). I should probably point out at this point that before we had even begun building together Seth had made a Lego wedding piece of his own a few weeks before, which we all thought was really cute and very well thought out.

We started out building a plain white box to encase the minifigures that we were going to make. The plan was to make a bow going across the box from each side but as we carried on building we added little bits of detail in like the white and yellow corner pillars. The box seemed far to dark so we opened up the sides with archways letting light in from every direction.

   I wanted the box to open up wide so we added a tooth hinge (which are probably my favourite Lego pieces, sad I know). Because of the angle of the bricks on this part I couldn't have matching arches. So I sat for quite sometime working out a door with a heart shape cut out, it was a pain but I got there in the end. It ended up looking so good that that I made a matching one for the top.

We built a circular platform (Seth's idea) for them to stand on and kept Seth's original table he had made as I thought it was great. A bottle of wine, glasses and flowers set the scene and it was starting to look pretty great.

Then it was my favourite part of any of our builds, minifigure time. I ordered the bride online as we didn't have one in our collection. Vikki has red hair though so I had to change the hair and rummage through our box looking for a face with matching eyebrows etc, Gareth was easy apart from the hair (his is short dark and curly, a style I've not seen on a minifigure so he got a hat instead (more about Gareth's hair later though).

Although the piece was really coming on we wanted to make it a little more personal, the problem is with a minifigure bride and groom is they can kind of look a little samey so we needed to accessorise. We raised the base of the box and added in a draw at the rear, inside we added a costume change for them both. Vikki is a fitness instructor, so sweatbands and a boombox were a definite, black and red gym attire is his colour scheme at the gym. Apparently he's always talking about how much meat he eats so having a leg of meat in our collection worked out well and then it's back to Gareth's hair. And Gareth if your reading, my apologies. I was told your minifigure NEEDED Afro hair so I ordered the disco dancer minifigure for the look. (after meeting his brother last night I realised the hair would have suited a minifigure for him perfectly).

The gift was finished...

Next was packaging and we wanted to keep it simple. A plain vintage looking brown wrapping but we made a Lego gift tag that ribbon could be threaded through

Obviously we had to make a card to compliment the gift too, simple yet elegant (I love Lego).

I started this post a couple of days ago, the wedding yesterday was amazing and it was so nice to be a part of it, I will write about in another post, our Lego gift went down really well and apparently will take pride of place in their home, which is always good to hear. Although I got stressed at the start, this build was a lot of fun and myself and the boys enjoyed being able to use our creative flair to create something that brings a smile to someone else's face for once. 

Congratulations Gareth and Vikki you look so happy together and it meant a lot to us to be able to share your magical day with you xxx

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

A few days back I wrote a post about building an indestructible toddler friendly iPhone case out of Lego. After going through a few high end covers (which were not cheap) I decided to give Lego a try, Lego being the answer to all my problems. It turned out great but has received mixed reviews. Negative comments usually being about the bulkyness of it. I obviously love it but decided a couple of nights ago that maybe it just wasn't eccentric enough. That night was one of those nights where I didn't have much to do, so while Mrs M tried to relax after a day of work I subjected her to the sound she hates most, as she put in a Facebook status update that night "Ah.... You know what sound I find most relaxing ? A thirty-something man rummaging through a pile of Lego last thing at night - bliss".

I'm a huge Dr. Seuss fan so building a Seuss themed Lego phone cover seemed like a good idea. I did say eccentric and it did need to fit my obscure personality. The basic shape was easy to build after making the last one so it took a lot less time to build. Mrs M looked puzzled wondering what I was doing but she's used to my evening Lego tinkering by now. I attempted to make the cats face but it didn't look right so I settled for an oversized hat to act as a partial screen protector for my new comical accessory. I added a spinning bow tie to the iphone cable cover which i thought gave a great effect.

Obviously all ports were easily accessible it would have been useless otherwise. I finished it off with a photo using the cat in the hat photo app which i already had on the phone (surprise surprise). If your reading this and you are interested in how the basic shape is made send me a message and i will happily do my best to make a tutorial.