HaRdLUG

Hampton Roads LEGO User Group

BIG NEWS: LEGO STORE NOW OPEN AT VIRGINIA BEACH TOWN CENTER

Next HaRdLUG Monthly Meeting:

Sunday, 12 November at 1 pm at ODU

(4211 Monarch Way, Norfolk, VA)

Here are some things we've built recently:

280 Gallon Fish Tank

Medieval Village

About us:

HaRdLUG is a group of adults and older teens in the cities of Hampton Roads, Virginia using LEGO to connect with our local community and each other and celebrating that play is something you never outgrow.

We share our passion for LEGO by displaying what we build at public events throughout our region, and are always looking for fun new partnerships which match our volunteer members' interests with the goals of organizations hosting community events.  

We have monthly meetings where we usually share some of the projects we are personally working on, plan for future events and collaborative displays, and occasionally have a building challenge or activity.  

Our next meeting is 12 November from 1-3pm at Innovation Research Park #2 at 4211 Monarch Way, Norfolk, VA.  We plan to return to our previous location at Norfolk Botanical Garden in 2024.

 

HaRdLUG Fish
Instructions to make a simple LEGO fish

Where to find us next:

Chesapeake Conference Center

700 Conference Center Drive Chesapeake, VA 

13 January 2024

with the Hampton Roads Naval Museum

Virginia Beach Sports Center

1045 19th Street, Virginia Beach, VA

03 February 2024

Richmond-Area Location TBD

03 February 2024

Fredericksburg Expo Center

2371 Carl D Silver Pkwy, Fredericksburg, VA

09-10 March 2024

Brick Convention cancelled their event planned for Hampton VA in October 2023.  🙁

We are hopeful that HaRdLUG will be able to work with them when they are ready to reschedule. 

What We've Done Lately:

HaRdLUG has been active in southeast Virginia since 2002.  If you visit the Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG), you can see our architectural models in the Baker Hall Visitor Center showing two exciting new structures coming as part of the "Garden of Tomorrow" campaign.  In addition to previously having our monthly meetings at NBG , we were also part of their Butterfly and Honeybee Festivals last summer.  We displayed at Tidewater Comicon and celebrated the NASA Artemis mission with a LEGO building event at Norfolk's Slover LibraryWith the Hampton Roads Naval Museum's Brick-by-Brick LEGO Shipbuilding event back live and in person in 2023, we built and brought all of our best boats!  

At this year's BrickFair in Chantilly, Virginia, we built a 560-square foot LEGO display (that's 28 big folding tables!) including a collaborative build of a huge medieval village and seaport, two enormous airports, a 280-gallon Lego aquarium, the battleship Arizona, a F4U Corsair, motorized Dragonboat Race, Adventurers scene, WWII battle, 10x-scale Deka Bricks, Pout-Pout Fish, microscale Newport News Shipbuilding, Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring (with real water), and a lot more!

Some of our partners for past events include:

Want To Be A Better Builder?  

There are a lot of great ways to up your brick-building game.  The best one is to just start building.  The key to doing anything well is being willing do it poorly, over and over, until you get better.  Your first new creations you make might not look like some of the impressive builds you've seen online, but keep on building and you'll learn and get better each time. 

 "Do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are HaRd." - John F. Kennedy