I’m really enjoying Lego’s collectible minifig series, but they’re beginning to over flow the top of my book shelf, time to give them a more suitable home.

This is the second print block drawer that i have for displaying Lego figures. I put the first one up several years ago, it houses some of the classic space and castle figures form my childhood, along with some of the newer licensed characters. This one however was bought with the sole purpose of displaying the collectible minifig line.

There are plenty of these on ebay, they make great display frames for anything you can fit in them. The one above has nice regular openings, but others are more varied. This one will keep all the minfigs up to series 6 neatly arranged and adds a bit of character to my dining room wall.

After seeing this article on Hackaday describing an easy to make silicone casting  material I knew I had to give it a quick go.  The photos here show the results of making a mold of a polymer clay heart and then making a heart shaped ice cube from it.

Oogoo is basically equal parts corn flour and sealant, mixed into a white goo.  This Instructable has all the details for making Oogoo and fully documents its many uses.

Mixing Oogoo takes a bit of effort, I used a cardboard tub as a container and an old paintbrush handle to mix with, this probably made it more difficult than it needed to be  but that’s what I had to hand.

Once mixed, i found it quite difficult to spread over my heart form, next time i plan to wear latex gloves and shape it by hand.

Even with my shoddy mixing, crappy tools and less than ideal spreading technique, I ended up with a usable mold in around 2- 3 hours. To test it out, I simply filled it with water and froze it for an hour or two.

As you can see, the Ice heart isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close.  A definite success!

In future, if I need to make a mold for any reason,  Oogoo is going to be my first port of call, its quick, cheap and absolutely stinks of vinegar. What more could you want?

As it’s Valentines day next week, it seems like a good time to post this project from 2008.

Partly inspired by Meredith Scheff’s travel journal this formed the casing for my ‘and finally’ present for my fiancée for Xmas 08.  Inside the book is a hollowed section, inside that a purple felt purse, inside that, a sparkly bracelet (the actual present).

The heart on the front is Fimo, formed with a cookie cutter with salt pushed in to the surface. When the salt dissolves, it leaves a pitted metal effect.

The compartment was cut about 10 days before Xmas day. I had to lock myself in the bedroom for a few hours to do it.

The book is one of two i’d bought from a charity shop, 50p each. I didn’t realise until later but both books are dedicated to people with the same surname as my fiancée, a nice bonus (but strange looks when she opened it).

The pouch was a last minute addition made from left over felt from a  Halloween project that never happened, the sewing is pretty rough, but did the job.

The final assembly of the book, inside covers and ribbons was completed the morning we left for Wales, requiring me to borrow her hair drier to speed things up a bit.

So far the results are looking promising, this batch is going back in for another 4 days with 80 grit. After that it gets tumbled for a week at progressivly finer grits before at least a week of polishing.

For more about rock tumbling, an excellent guide can be found here.

• A Photo, drawing or idea
• Lego lots of
• more Lego
• Time

Step One – convince the NLSO (Non Lego significant other)

I’d wanted to make a Lego mosaic for some time, but lacked suitable Inspiration. Nine months later and inspiration hit in the form of my new born daughter, Ffion Carys.

When Ffion was about 4 months old, I started the mosaic. It took a while to convince Lou (my fiancée) that this was a good idea and worth the money. She was up for a mosaic, but only a small one, I wanted a big one (don’t we all?). Anyway the 2 images to the right convinced her, one is a single Lego baseboard (48*48) the other is 4 baseboards (96*96).

I found a suitable picture of Ffion that my brother had taken when she was about 3 months old, a bit of tweaking was needed, just to straighten it up a bit.

I reduced the image to 90 *90 pixels (giving me a 3 pixel border) and reduced the colours to a close approximation of the Lego bricks I was planning on using ( Black, Drk Grey, Light Grey and white).

So far so good, once I had the image at the right size and colour, I used a program called Bricksaic to generate the plans. Bricksaic does a lot more than just generate the plans. It can do all the parts I did in photoshop, but I preferred to have the extra control over the image.

The Plans also gave me a piece count. About 8000. ouch!

This is the point at which I made a mistake, I generated the plans without the border on, so all my plans were shifted 6 studs up and left. I wouldn’t find this out till some time later when I had the parts and the plans printed.

Step Two

I needed baseboards, 1×1 studs and border pieces, that all came to 8500+ pieces, now if each piece was a penny it’d be a lot of cash, most bits were more than a penny (all of them in fact). The hardest part of selling this to Lou was cost, I predicted it’d be about £150. After agreeing to pay for it from my personal dev fund I was on the hunt for the parts. Baseboards came from a local toyshop and lego.com, a reasonable price compared to toys r us. I’m down about £30 already, ouch.

Next up is the the smaller quantities of 1×1 studs, black, white and dark grey, about 1/3 of the total piece count. As the base plates are light grey, I could get away with not buying the 5000 light grey bits for a while.

Sourcing enough white parts in the UK was difficult, it required 3 orders from 3 people. All the bricks were bought from bricklink, a sort of Lego eBay.

The first stage of construction was quite easy, taking an evening and a day to do.

Early photos looked great, some people (Lou) would have left it like this, but the seams between the baseboards annoyed me. Back to brick link and £90 of light grey plates, some 2×2 plates for bracing and 2×2 black bricks for the border. Mistake number 2, changing my mind to have a smaller border. My rough estimation said I’d have enough 1×1′s to finish, more on that later. Receiving the 5000 light grey bricks in the post made me feel like some sort of plastic drug smuggler. This lot cost about £90.

Step Three

Clicking 5000 bricks into place is boring, bloody boring, no two ways about it. This stage took ages, early on in the project i decided to have all the studs orientated the same way, so the word ‘Lego’ was the right way up on each of them, not doing that again!

This stage took a while, it’d lost a bit of motivation, we’d had the christening and all sorts of little things kept me from carrying on. I eventually sat down and attacked the remaining bits in a bout a week and a half of evenings.

It’d left the middle 2 columns and rows till the end so I could place the 2×2 plates to help join the mosaic together. This is where I learnt my calculations were wrong. I didn’t have enough light grey, worse still it wasn’t a lot, being 100 short would have been ok, but I was 20 short, 20 when I’d ordered 5000!!

I decided to carry on and order the extra bits later. I was determined to mount the mosaic while Lou was in Wales. I’d bought a sheet of 6mm mdf, it was 4ftx2ft, I cut it to 2.5ft x 2ft and planned to let the bottom 6 inches hang free. I was using carpet tape and hot glue to attach the base plates to the mdf. I left it flat for a few days to allow everything to set, I was quite nervous at this point, but every thing had gone well and it was all very secure. Two eyelets were screwed in each side and picture wire was used to hang the mosaic on 2 screws me and my brother had put in the wall. The mosaic was finished (apart from those 20 bloody pieces!!).

Update: the mosaic is still up, and the glue still holding. Woo!