School is over, and Tuscan sun is cooking me well. Using my activity of educator as an excuse to buy new LEGO sets, I got the small and nice LEGO Creator set 31014. With this set you can build an excavator, a dump truck and a front loader. This set, together with many other LEGO Creator, City and Mixels sets, has a feature: all the parts are sealed in the same bag (while bigger sets have the parts divided into more bags).

There is a really fun and very popular LEGO building challenge that is often part of LEGO conventions, called the LEGO Build-In-The-Bag Competition. The contest involves building a LEGO set inside its original sealed bag, without opening, tearing or damaging the plastic bag containing the LEGO elements. Whoever completes first the LEGO set inside the packaging wins. Before you start building,  you should estimate if the finished model can still fit inside the original packaging. With some of the sets the loose LEGO elements all fit fine in the original baggie, but once assembled the final model is too big to fit inside the bag. (source).

Build-in-the-bag is so cool!

I challenged myself, and got the Front Loader built in about 15 minutes. As the models grew inside the bag, it was more and more difficult to add new parts to the model. This is a fun activity that I recommend to everyone. Since you won’t need to open the bag, you can build small LEGO sets like this even by the sea, under the beach umbrella.