Thursday 2 April 2009

Lego Golden Beads Alternative

A while ago I posted here about the golden beads I made for Little-N from Lego. Thank you everyone for your comments, I really appreciate them.
Amber from Adventures of a Rainbow Mama also made them and blogged about them, her blog is great so if you haven't seen it before you better go over and check it out.
Amber asked what the trick was for making the 100 square and 1000 cube. So I decided to post this so that anyone else who is going to try this out knows what to do. If you have a better idea please share it :)
For the 100 square I made a 10x10 square from flat lego pieces. In the above picture I have separated them a bit so you can see. I did 3 layers so that each square is the same as a normal lego piece in height. The bits were sometimes quite small so I made sure I crossed them to hold the square together firmly.

Here's the 100 square from the top. I wanted the pins to show so that Little-N can count them to make sure that each square was 100.

For the 1000 cube, make a base of a 10x10 square basically the same as with the 100 square. Then build up the 'walls' so that there are 8 layers of walls on top of the based square.

If you have enough lego u can fill the inside so that it is really solid and does have 100o pins inside.
To finish off put a 100 square on the top and then u should have a 1000 cube. I made each layer in a different colour so that Little-N can count that they are ten layers. 10x 100 is a 1000.

Amber also made a short bead stair from the lego which is a brilliant idea. I decided to make it as well just for the sake of it and this is what I came up with. I tried to keep each number a different colour for the sake of colour coding.

For the 5, 7 and 9 piece, I made them up of flat pieces and layered them so that they would be the same height as the other pieces. The picture above shows they're side views so that you can see that the 7 bar was made from flat 4s and 3s layered.
Here's the view of the short bead stair when each piece is on its side. I think I prefer the first pic as it looks more like the real short beads stair.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Wow! What a woman :) Thanks for this great explanation. I have linked to your post here:

http://adventuresofarainbowmamamama.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-lego-golden-beads.html

Who even knew that you could get 10 pin pieces of lego?! I don't think that we have any flat pieces of lego in our collection but I like that you had little-N just counting the pins on the top so it doesn't really matter how 'tall' the 100 square might be.

Thanks again. I love that I write something here in Australia before I head to bed & when I wake up someone in England has responded with a whole post. Amazing!