Little Guy is in to Lego, so now I’m in to Lego.

And I’m probably more in to Lego than he is.

All of this began with me watching his sets that he had gotten for Christmas or for birthdays, and we had so carefully built together, slowly disintegrate back into the box of all the Legos. I wondered if there were a website where you can enter in all of the sets you have and find out what else you can build with your Legos.

Thankfully there was, because it is a fantastic idea and I am not the man to build such a thing.

Rebrickable is a near magical site, where you can do exactly that, enter the sets you own, and where hundreds (maybe thousands) of Lego builders worldwide upload their designs, or MOCs (short for My Own Creations) and you can see all of the marvelous designs that you can build with the Legos you have. They even provide instructions.

It is like making new toys from the toys you already have.

And these MOCs are brilliant. Go look at them. Now. I will wait…

Did you go visit them? Aren’t they marvelous?

So inspired by these MOCs, I wanted to create a MOC, too.

Of course, you’re creating a MOC every time you freebuild with your pile of Legos, but I wanted to take it to the next step.

I found Studio 2 (and it is free) by bricklink, which allows you to build Legos digitally, and creates step by step instructions for your build.

This weekend, while freebuilding with little guy, I built a little mini spaceship, shown in the photo above.

It seemed like a good candidate to recreate in Studio for my first build because it was only about 15 or so pieces. Perfect.

I dove in to Studio, (which does have a helpful tutorial) and built this little guy from the ground up.

This is my little spaceship (with twin interstellar rotors, of course) before I’ve added brick colors.

What took just a few minutes in real life took me a couple of hours to build in Studio, mostly because of my lack of familiarity with how it worked. (Don’t be daunted. Studio is remarkably intuitive, and you are much smarter than I am. My saving grace is a willingness to be bad at things.)

More on the instructions and brick color selection in part 2 of my first Moc, coming just as soon as I have a bit of time to write it.