Lodomo

Melvin & I were playing dominoes this morning, when Melvin got bored & started building things with the dominoes, so we decided to get out a block set.

Since I've been reading about British railways quite a bit lately, we chose a Lott's Lodomo set, and built the railway Signal Cabin from the instruction sheet.

Earlier this year, I got rather involved in studying Sears Houses & their ilk, long a sideline of my interest in Vernacular Architecture, it finally got primary attention. While you can model such houses from kits, they are a bit tougher to build from blocks, a contributing factor in my quietness in this blog for a while.

For the best starter book on enjoying Sears Houses, I strongly recommend Rosemary Thornton's Sears Homes of Illinois - even if you live further from Illinois than I do in Seattle, this book still has the best information and images for helping you see what the houses in the Sears catalogs can look like today.

I'm not claiming that mill-cut house kits were a kind of Block Play, but maybe they're distant cousins?

For me though, I'll look for catalog houses while I am driving around, but at home my constructions will be closer to Melvin's scale.

Lodomo is great fun, and there's even a fine little book called Building Toys with history & color pictures of the various kinds of Lott's sets, as well as several other types of British building sets.

Good Block Play