Close to Home...

Last night I went out to the Red Robin in Kennewick, WA, with my family.  (For the record, this is the restaurant where I first met my husband; match.com did it's work well!)  My 3-yr. old son was throwing a fit that he had to leave the racing game in the entryway to go sit at a table, so I had to take him out into a little anteroom.  That's the only reason that I happened to notice that the large picture of the Red Robin character on the wall was made completely out of LEGO. 

Here's the photo I took, showing my fussy son, who did not seem nearly as thrilled about finding this mosaic as I did. 

It was done by Laura Munger (lachme), who has done quite a few other mosaics.  She has a blog and a flickr account, where you can see some other things that she has done.  She talks a lot about her mosaics on her blog, including a fun story about this particular one:  "i was working at the red robin at this time, and decided to make a red robin cartoon for my next project. once it was finished, i brought it into work and showed my it to my manager. i told her she could buy it for her store if she wanted, or if not, i could take it home and take it apart . . . and no, i don't consider that blackmail, just good negotiations. i sold that mosaic to red robin for $1600."

Another of the mosaics I found that I really like is this Washington State University cougar logo:

I'm not a Cougar myself, but my brother, sister, husband, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and various cousins and friends all went there.  This mosaic has the "Tri-Cities" label in the corner.  The WSU Tri-Cities campus is right across the river from my parents house, and where my daughter's ballet recital was this spring.  Laura said she was donating this mosaic to the WSU Tri-Cities campus.  You can read more about this mosaic here.   [I am perhaps a bit overly-excited about this, but it's just so rare to see anything LEGO-related that has anything to do with my real-world life.  Bear with me please!]

The blog also has a lot of interesting ideas for LEGO clocks, which you can see here.  I think this is my favorite:

I love geometric designs, and I also love the clever construction technique, of stacking them like q-bert cubes.  I suppose the only potential problem with this would be that the white hands of the clock tend to blend in with the white bits of LEGO, making it hard to see what time it is.  But that's a minor point in a nifty design.