LEGO, DUPLO and what's in the recycling bin

The kids are still really into the LEGO hacking fun we've been having lately. We had two little friends visit us for a sleep over, and the subject of trains and cars and trucks came up.

In the recycling bin we had several empty raisin boxes that I thought we could make a train out of with the LEGO (no, I'm not shouting at you, I only just found out that it's all uppercase rather than Lego).

We have a couple of different types of lego wheels. Small ones that are quite recent, and larger ones that are from the early eighties (I love that about LEGO. The stuff is indestructable!).



I used a stamp pad like I did in the original post to stamp onto the opened up raisin box where the LEGO knobbles were going to line up. I punched the last two on either end of the box. I think you could do this without that long green piece (and we did with cars that I will put in another post), but I was thinking maybe the green piece would give the carriage more rigidity.





Once the box was punched I placed the box over the knobbles and secured it with two little LEGO pieces.



All that had to be done then was to fold up the box again and glue the long side back together.



I didn't glue the ends of the box because I wanted the kids to be able to open it and swap out carriages with the bases themselves.



I drew up an engine and a circus carriage with lion for them, but left the others blank for them to draw on themselves. My first idea was to just use a few of my hair elastics to join the carriages, but that turned out pretty lame and didn't give the kids the easy option to reorder and reconnect the carriages themselves (they were only three, four and five years old)



Instead I opted to cut some more card and punch some couplings for them to use. These worked really well and although the three year old kids found them fiddly, the five year old kids had no trouble taking them apart and putting them back together.

Here are a few pics of how the couplings worked...

Lots of people in the last post I did were lamenting that their kids were not yet old enough for the teeny LEGO. Don't let that stop you experimenting! Both sizes of the DUPLO can be hacked with the contents of your recycling bin too!

I don't have a hole punch that would work for DUPLO, but the stuff is so much less fiddly that you can just cut a big hole rather than lots of small punches. We used a butter box from the recyling to make a DUPLO carriage in this way.

Just openned up the butter box like I did with the raisin boxes and stamped the shape of the knobbles on the card, then drew around them and cut out the hole so that it was a snug fit around the knobbles on the little cart base we had.





Then put a couple of other bits of DUPLO on top to secure it.



Fold it all up and glue it shut. Cut some windows and doors with an Exacto blade.





This time the hair bobble thing worked well to connect the wagon to the cowboy's car because the DUPLO wheeled bases already have couplings would work with and I just needed to extend it with the hair bobble.





Only draw back to using the butter box was the finish on the inside was obviously treated to prevent grease from damaging it, so my daughter had to use sharpies to colour it in. Most boxes wouldn't have this problem though.



The good thing about the DUPLO wheeled bases is that the wheels do not come above the base, so you are not restricted to using a box that is narrower than the wheel base like you are with the smaller LEGO.



I hope you can find some boxes that you can use in your recycling. There must be infinite combinations that can be made with different LEGO/DUPLO pieces and different boxes combined with different imaginations!

Lastly, the biggest size of DUPLO can just be added to by cutting a circular hole in a cardboard cup.

This lets the kids give any of their toys a ride, rather than just being limited to the DUPLO people and animals.



Have fun!



Printables to come in the next post (It was a very crafty LEGOtastic sleep over)

Promise that I'll post something other than LEGO related messing about after the next post ;) I've just been going with the flow of what the kids are finding most fun and they can't seem to get enough of LEGO and cardboard at the moment.

Festive card hole punching with more Lego

Well, it seems that a lot of people are really excited to try playing with Lego and hole punched card after the last post, so while your enthusiasm is still up I thought I'd make you a printable Christmassy cut out and punch set.



We're starting on making our Christmas dioramas that I mentioned at the end of the last post. Usually I just draw stuff as we are doing it and the kids colour it in right then and there, so there aren't drawings that I am able to scan and share, so I thought I should do a few with a sharpie that I can scan before the kids get their hands on them.

All you need are some card to print on, scissors, hole punch and some lego.

Click on the thumbnail below to get the full resolution image.


If I manage to draw anything else without the kids colouring it in immediately then I'll try and scan it and get it up here for you too. Hope you enjoy playing!

Lego and hole punching card

It's been all over the intertoobs these last couple of weeks. My mate Gary sent me a link (thank you Mr G for keeping me festooned with valuable inspiration) Lego has teamed up with Muji to offer little kits that you can use to hole punch card and fit it neatly between lego bricks to build creatures and other interesting looking bits and bobs.

It's an absolutely great idea. I love the idea. It's got so many posibilities, but the actual kits they are offering are pretty limiting when you consider what you can accomplish on your own with some lego and a hole punch that you already have. Especially if you are in the habit of pilfering paint chips from Home Depot.

Really, this sort of thing is only going to appeal to small kids if they have maximum freedom of expression with it, rather than being limited to putting together small, pre-made kits (never mind that they are only available in Japan at the moment anyway).

The very afternoon that Gary sent me the link to these intriguing kits, me and my filth wizards sat down with our lego, paint chips and hole punch to see what we could create.


They did some cutting shapes and I did the hole punching to get the holes in the right places (our hole punch happens to be a bit bigger than the circular knobs on the lego, so it was fairly forgiving as far as accuracy goes, and I could just eyeball it.



We built a whole load of structures with the punched card and lego. One ended up being a kind of multi storey car park thingy.



Then I wondered if it would be easier to punch holes in larger sheets if I dabbed a stamp pad onto one of our lego base boards to get an imprint of where all the knobbles were to punch. This worked out pretty well, so I made a print out of a letter sized bit of paper showing punching guides that you can just cut out a shape and punch away.


Here's the template to print on some card if you want to try it out. Just click on the thumbnail to get the full resolution, and remember to not scale to fit page when printing, or you might get it printing out not at the right size to fit the lego.

We made some stairs using this...

Then I began to wonder about using the lego to act as a base to stand up cardboard characters for imaginative play and the possibility of making a kind of diorama.

I sat and asked the kids what characters they wanted to colour and cut out and drew them as they coloured. We ended up with monsters, robots, animals, aliens, spacemen and princess fairies, which I hole punched for them and they stuck lego bricks on either side of to stand them up.


Then the kids became interested in drawing their own characters and that's when the fun really began for me. I have a huge love of kid's drawings.




This rather displeased robot that my five year old drew just makes me grin from ear to ear!
My five year old wanted to make a backdrop, so she drew and coloured the hill with a rainbow and I hole punched and legoed it up so that it would stand on the table.
Gradually the kids kept making more and more things to go with the back drop and they all connected together with the lego to make a really cute little diorama doodad.

Yep, that's my two girls in the front there, as drawn by the big one.


We haven't started yet, but the next plan is to make a Christmas diorama in the same way, with santa, reindeer, trees, sleigh, snowmen and all that good stuff. This would also be a great way for kids to make their own nativity scene! The possibilities for them to take the products of their imagination into reality with this technique is very exciting. Probably for kids that are much older than mine (that are only three and five)as well!

UPDATE:

Thank you for all the kind words people have left in the comments. I thought I should pop in at the bottom here that I've scanned some of the festive diorama cut outs that I drew for the kids. If you would like to print, colour and punch them yourself they are right here. Enjoy!

Further Update:

More ideas for LEGO and hole punched card:

Post on using LEGO and DUPLO with whatever is in your recycling.

Post with two free printables for a LEGO car to punch and add wheels, and a DUPLO truck to cut and add wheel base.