Lego Storage

Organizing Lego bricks has always been something of a problem, if you're inclined to categorize. We took a clear plastic lidded box, a SmartStore Classic 31, and cut clear plastic sheets into the proper shape, to divide the box into sections. The sheets are polycarbonate Lexan sheets, 1.5 mms thick, just thin enough to be cuttable with household scissors. Five sheets were used in one direction, giving one compartment for each of the six traditional Lego colors. Compartment width was chosen to match the relative frequency of each color.



Where the sheets cross each other, we cut out a thin rectangle from both sheets, from the top to the center in one sheet, and from the bottom to the center in the other, to form a cross halving joint. It was helpful to drill a 2 mm hole at the inner edge of the rectangle, and then make two parallel cuts from the side to the hole. We fastened the plastic sheets with hot glue to the box. One long sheet was placed perpendicular to the six shorter ones, to stabilize and to separate thin and thick bricks.



Here is the box with the divisions in place and filled with our supply of bricks.

Dot grid beads

Attempting to make Fimo clay beads with a simple repeating pattern. They turned out to serve as illustration of how reduction distorts a pattern. I thought I was using a lot of dark brown buffer clay around the gray dot, but in the first step (4 dots) we already see the dots beginning to square up. When reducing the 4-dot cane, and forming the 16-dot cane, the corners have escaped further into the corners... Possible remedies: more buffer, and perhaps making the canes on a larger scale in the first place.


The ends of the dot grid cane contained patterns which are perhaps more interesting than the actual dot grid. Made some round beads with slices on the surface.

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