Building a Cubby Organizer

My boys LOVE legos.  We have pieces in every nook and cranny of our house.  I'm sure some have found its way into our vacuum.  When I saw this cubby organizer at my neighbor's house, I knew I wanted it.  At the time, they didn't sell the cubby organizer any longer so I was a bit disappointed.  However, a couple of months ago, I was mentioning to my other neighbor about the organizer and she said she saw online.  It was a modified version of the one they sold a few years back, but the concept was the same.  I waited patiently for a friends and family sale and voila, it finally came.  Did I buy it?  Nope.  I was so disappointed they didn't sell it in the store and when I tried to purchase it online, adding in the shipping and surcharges didn't make it worth it to me.  I decided to build it myself.  Do I love it?  That's a BIG whopping YES!




I measured E.'s wall where the cabinet would hang and decided to make it to the dimensions of the one that was being sold.

I drew out how I was going to build it and it just so happened my dad came to visit that week and saw my drawing.  He decided to help me out.  We bought 1x6x8's and ripped the edges so they would be around 5 inches deep.

 

Then, he made notches in the wood so that the shelves would slide into place.

We contemplated if we wanted the shelves to be removable, but in the end, I decided to nail them in permanently.

 

One row done, 4 more to go!

I then puttied all the nail holes and then sanded everything down.

 

  

It sat in my garage for the longest time because I knew the next part would not be fun.

I had to stain, polyurethane, sand, then polyurethane and sand again all 25 cubby holes.  This was so tedious and I seriously contemplated whether or not it needed a second coat of polyurethane.  Of course, the perfectionism in me would never allow me to skip that step, but I was pretty drained with all the work that went into this project and that thought did cross my mind.

The total project was $17.  That's a great savings, but I did spend about 10 hours from start to finish.  In hind sight, I would have to say this would be a project that is WORTH purchasing over making.  If you have the time, its a great project to do.  If you don't, it's SO worth cost of the item plus shipping and surcharge.  I only say that because what I made is basically what was sold.  Had it been a custom piece that needed certain specific dimensions, that would be a different story. I did build a cabinet for E. on the other side of the bed that was custom and SO worth the time and effort, but that project will be saved for another post. 

 

For now, my kiddos have a place to put all their Lego creations.  Currently, it's home to all their Mixel creations.  I think it is super cute and I LOVE LOVE LOVE how it turned out.  I'm happy that all the hours I put into building it created a piece that I am proud of.

The bed and all cabinets are built!  3/4 of the room is done.  Only 1/4 to go!  E.'s room is turning out to be simply a hand-built room and I love it!

Autumn Candy Legos

I'm a perfectionist, but I'm human so I do make mistakes.  To celebrate fall, I thought I'd make some candy covered pretzels.  The orange candy melt was supposed to make the pretzels look like little pumpkins, but it turned out pretty ugly (despite that, my kids did devour them all), but I still had a bowl of melted candy melt I didn't want to dump so I decided to pull out my lego mold I made and make some legos for the kids.

Autumn colored legos to celebrate fall.

I love how they look just like legos, from size and shape. The instructions for making the mold is here. 

It looked so realistic that A. thought I was nuts when I told him to eat it.  I had to reinforce to him that it really was candy.  It wasn't until he saw his brothers devour them that he decided to finally taste it.  That moment was pretty priceless.

Lego Birthday Party

Over the weekend, we celebrated E.'s 7th birthday with a Lego Birthday Party. When he asked for this, I really had no idea where to start. Fortunately, I found so many resources online that I wanted to do it all. Here are some of the things that made it to the party.

I started with hand made invitations. I went photoshopping away and designed these:

The most time consuming part of the invitation was modifying the lego man. I found an image of a surfer mini-figure to coincide with the pool party motif, but he had a beard, blond hair and no glasses....nothing like E, so off to the salon he went. I shaved off his beard, gave him some glasses and he got a new do.

When the kiddos arrived, everyone wanted to immediately jump in the pool and go swimming. If they were hungry, they got to snack on cheetos, oreos, chips, popcorn and wafer cookies.

Last year, the cupcakes melted in the heat so I kept those inside the house until after lunch. I also wanted the kids to have room for lunch which leads me to the lunch menu. We served homemade pizza (E.'s favorite). I made the crust into a square and added pepperoni slices on top to make it resemble a lego block. The kids also ate watermelon slices and chips along with their pizza.

After lunch was cake. I made this lego cake out of fondant.



One layer was chocolate and one layer was white.



The lego man was made from rice krispy treats.

Along with cake, we had cupcakes, and lego pops.

I used a cupcake stand to display additional cupcakes and candies.



I used my molds I had bought and made to make lego candy from candy melts.



I love the simplicity of the lego candy. They look so real, don't they?



I built a box to surround the lego pops out of duplo blocks.



I had fun decorating the different faces of the lego pops.

After eating cake and candy, the kids enjoyed some "lego" games. First up was guessing how many legos were in the jar. The winner got to choose between iron man lego set or a mini-figure key chain.

Then, the kids played a game I would like to call, the lego pick up game. I grouped the kids into 3 teams. Each team member had a minute or two to pick up as many pieces of legos using their chopsticks as they could before handing the chopsticks to the next person. When everyone had gone, we counted the pieces and the team with the most legos won a prize.

I ordered the kid chopsticks off of amazon and tested the possibility of picking up the legos with my kids beforehand.

The next game was seeing how high the kids could stack legos in a certain amount of time. The wind made it especially difficult, but the kids loved the challenge.

(re-enacted photos...I was too busy to take photos during the party)

After the games, it was time to go home. Each kid received a goodie bag. The goodie bags were just colored bags I bought at Michael's and applied 1.5" circles on the front to make it resemble lego blocks.

I went on the Lego site and nabbed some mini-figure pics to print out name tags on the bags for a personal touch.

Inside the bag, was a lego club magazine and a lego set (either an airplane or a car) that I bought at the Lego store (from the lego birthday kit). I did try to get last month's flower mini-build for the girls, but they ran out.

I also included a package of mini-figure crayons that I made and a package of either mini-figure soap or lego brick soap that I also made.

Since I decided to hand out juice boxes instead of individual cups, the kids got to pick out a lego-head straw to take home with them.

I am beyond lego'd out, how about you? In the end, the weeks of preparation was well worth it to see E. have a wonderful birthday. As thank you cards, I printed out a group picture of all the kids at the party. I don't know if their parents want their pictures online so I'll let you use your imagination on that one.

I hope you had a wonderful birthday E. You are definitely worth every minute spent.

Making Your Own Silicone Mold

I love working with silicone molds because of the removal ease. When E. told me he wanted a Lego birthday party, I was on the hunt for some Lego brick molds. The only place that I could find them was on ebay for a highly inflated price. I would need to buy a couple of molds, and in the end, have to worry about the temperature (since the molds only work in temperatures less than 140 degrees). Even so, I was ready to click the "buy it now" button on ebay until I read a post on making your own Lego mold on instructables.

It wasn't until I did a little more research and found a local supply store that sold food grade silicone that really prompted me to make the leap and try making my own mold.  Amazon also sells the exact same Smooth-Sil 940 kit as well now.  I wanted food grade silicone because I knew I wanted to pour chocolate and make gummies from that mold. I ended up buying Smooth-Sil 940. There are other options you can find online like Copyflex, which I would have preferred to use because of the 1:1 ratio, but I was impatient and wanted to start right away, opting for what was available in the store. The Smooth-Sil 940 has a 10:1 ratio so a little math is in order when calculating how much you will need of each item.

Each package comes with two parts, Part A and B. You need 10 parts A to 1 part B.

I started making my Positive for my mold. I placed all the lego pieces that I wanted on a regular base plate. I surrounded the edge with two rows of legos to contain the silicone while it hardened.

In hindsight, I had enough silicone to make an entire lego baseplate, but I wanted to play it safe and didn't want to come out short so I made it a little smaller.

Since I had no idea how much silicone I needed, I decided to get a rough estimate by measuring with some alphabet pasta I already had in my pantry.

I filled my mold and then measured in a measuring cup.

Next came the math. I had to convert the 1.5 cups into lbs since you needed to measure part A in pounds and ounces. I had to convert that to grams to get the correct amount of part B since my gram scale measures with grams for smaller amounts.

I stirred part A before measuring it out.

Next, I added part B.

I stirred the two compounds for 3-4 minutes until they were completely mixed. It was so thick that it kept breaking my chopsticks. I suggest using paint stirrers instead. I didn't have any on hand so I used some disposable chopsticks.

After my great workout, I poured my mixture into my mold. The website suggests, holding the mixture up high and pouring over only one spot, allowing the silicone to spread itself over the mold.

In the end, I had a little too much silicone, so I quickly built a mini mold so that I could make a base plate using fondant or chocolate.

I let it set for 24 hours.

Then, the fun began. I removed all the lego pieces.

The pieces just popped right out

to reveal my negative mold.

I used a razor blade to clean out the edges since the silicone had seeped through the edges of the mold. Here is my base plate mold.

I envisioned having a huge base plate at the top of the cake so that prompted me to make this mold with my excess silicone.

I can't wait to start using my mold! In the end, the silicone cost of $35 was equivalent to buying two molds on ebay, but I was able to create the exact lego pieces that I wanted and more of it so I am super happy with my decision. Imagine all the things you can make with silicone? The possibilities are endless.