The Children of Noisy Village

I'm happy to intruduce You to my first Lego Ideas project.

It's based on a book (or a series, depending on the edition) by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren "The Children of Noisy Village" a.k.a. "The Six Bullerby Children" (there was also a movie).

The book tells a story of six kids enjoying simple rural life in an idyllic Scandinavian setting and I thought it would make for a nice and very playable Lego set. I wanted to include as much of this happy-go-lucky atmosphere as I could in my build. So in this village You can:

- ride a horse (or drive a wagon)

- climb trees and boulders

- go fishing

- swim in a lake

- catch clayfish

- collect birds' eggs

- shoot a bow or a slingshot

- pet a cat

- train a dog

- play with cows, pigs, chickens and bunnies

- ride a bicycle

- collect cherries

- draw maps of hidden trasures

- send letters to your neighbours by twine

- read newspapers to your friend's almost blind grandpa

- kiss a frog in hope it's an enchanted prince or princess

- help your Mom bake cookies - then eat them

- do a thousand other things...

I have put some effort to recreate the setting of the books. So we have three houses, the northern, the southern and the middle. The big tree is built in a way to allow the minifigs to get from the southern house to the middle, using its branches. There is a small lake behind the nothern house and a cherry tree just next to it and there are rocks (or boulders) beside the southern house. I also included as many clues from the book as I could inside the buildings.

The minifigs themselves represent characters from the book. The choice of characters is somewhat arbitrary, I just included all family members of the six children and excluded everybody else but it already makes for a healthy 13 minifigs.

The children from the book are 7-9 years old. I wanted to keep the build simple enough for the kids of that age to cope with. Nevertheless some Lego experience is definitely required and I believe an AFOL parent can have some fun too. The set is really large but if someone is impatient, they can build just one of the three houses and already have a functional toy - then countinue with the remaining buildings another time.

This set already contains nearly 3000 bricks, so I had to spare parts on tiling and textures. Still, this architecture is meant to be simple and all in all I'm quite happy with the final visual impression.

Somehow these red cottages also remind me Lego sets from 70's and 80's, like Lego 376 and for me it's an added value. On the other hand I introduced some SNOTs, 45 degree roofs and other moderately advanced techniques and I believe the build is not too repetitive or boring.