12/24/2023
Well LEGO Brickmasters just finished up its latest season and Jamie Berard is now the face of LEGO in many ways.
At BrickFest 2005, I set up engraving bricks and trying to sell my WoodStiches, which were veneered LEGO bricks of all kinds of different real woods. Kind of a lame name, but when creating designs out of them it was kind of like stitching. I met Jamie there and he did some incredible Ferris Wheel or something. His mother kind of hung out at my booth and we got to talking-she I think she kind of liked my wooden bricks. Really nice lady and I persuaded her to take some and give to Jamie to see what he would come up with using these revolutionary woodenized bricks Well he got a job at TLG as a designer that weekend if I remember correctly, and he was kind of like a rock star in the AFOL world. But three or four months later got a photo from him of his creation. Pretty sure because his mother had asked hime to do it for me. :) And that is what this photo is. He is one creative guy.
When I came up with the idea of engraving on LEGO bricks and personlizing them, I became involved in the AFOL community. They had events and I made LEGO Name Badges and keyrings,etc-I guess my claim to fame in the LEGO world :). A whole lot of people have copied that idea as well as printing on them. You cannot have any LEGO event without a LEGO brickbadge. Or at least an event brick. So I went to many of the early AFOL Brick Conventions.
I really did not like the color palette of LEGO and thought what a great idea if you could veneer bricks and use them as modular parquetry and marquetry for designs and mosaics. They required no glue, they could be taken apart and rearranged, and they looked pretty. You could change your table top or coasters or whetever you liked. Or could even build log cabins out of them I mean rosewood and walnut and burl maple and ... are just pretty. I had about 40 different woods-dogwood, btw was the whitest. I had always liked to do woodworking and veneering. Could make cool chessboards out of them and mosaics and trophies and deskplates and ... -I came up with lots of uses for them. You could even make a very expensive floor or tabletop out of them that would hold up for years.
Problem was of course they took an incredible amount of time to produce. And would be expensive.
Still a great idea and with modern machinery could probabaly easily mass produce them. Surprised someone has not done that.
I still have a couple thousand dollars worth of all kinds of cool veneers in a drawer in my garge.
So I guess I have a Jamie Berard one and only original-at least a photo of it as since he was in Denmark with his new job, could not mail it to me. :)
That BrickFest put on by Joe Meno was a pivotal one. Nathan Sawaya brought his "Yellow" and Sean Kenney brought some incredible build. Understand I am not a LEGO builder-much more of an artist kind or a product design type. I was sitting at the bar and couple of strangers were there and we got talking over drinks, and I asked them if they had gone to the LEGO Con. I told them that they should as really pretty unique event. I said check out that Ferris Wheel, and that yellow piece of sculpture and whatever piece that Sean had brung. I cannot remember but it was very cool. Well Nathan said that he had done the Yellow. Sean said he had built whatever it was he had done that I really admired. I was impressed and we talked about art and stuff.
And Adam Reed Tucker brought his ridiculously cool skyscrapers which led to the founding of the Architectual Theme-which is still going strong. I actually suggested and engraved those 1x8 tiles for the original prototypes Adam made to present to TLG. And they still use them.
The only thing really did with the WoodStitches was to make some cool deskplates, a few chess boards and a mosaie of the owner of LEGO. That is the second picture of him signing it. Now that really is a one of a kind. Took me 2 or 3 months to figure out how to make those bricks and create the photomosaic out of them.
