Lott's Sea-Side Cottage

Lott's Tudor Blocks, Revised Series, dates from the 1950s, and is delightful. The Sea-Side Cottage (their hyphen) is one of eighteen sample designs provided for the 31 bricks and cardboard roof piece.

The booklet also shows eighteen additional designs are shown for the larger Box 2, and the booklet cover and box lid show designs for set 4. Inspiration for more buying, as well as more building.

For the first time, I am using an actual Lott's roof on a Tudor construction, and the original roof that came with my set 1 at that. It's a more recent acquisition than my earlier Lott's Tudor posts, for which I had to make construction paper roofs.

While double-checking my date recollections of this series, I was pleased to see that Andy Harris had updated his Lott's web pages in this very area just a few days ago. Nice coincidence.

Cute building. Nice project size. Good Block Play.

Lott's Tudor Pavilion

Yesterday in a favorite neighborhood used book store, I picked up a nice pictorial of Pavilions, which is British for the building alongside a cricket pitch. I'm not particularly interested in cricket, but I enjoy the architecture of small vernacular buildings, and the pavilions at village cricket pitches can be quite small and vernacular. From there they range up to large and ornate for the major contenders, but even they tend to be interesting in their ornateness. It was cheap, I had a store credit from selling them some of my discards, so it came home with me.

Then yesterday's mail brought me Gary Birch's recent Lott's booklet from the Lott's hometown Bushey Museum - I highly recommend this fine (and inexpensive!) booklet to anyone with an interest in Lott's or construction sets in general. I learned a lot (pun accepted) not just about Lott's, but about the construction toy business in the between-wars and postwar eras.

To cap it all off, a new batch of Lott's manual scans arrived in my email this morning, with the first structure being a cricket pavilion.

How could I resist?

Not enough blocks? I borrowed some from size-compatible American-made Liberty Blocks, hiding them in back.

No roofs? I still had the homemade roof from my first Lott's Tudor post, and cut a 8.75" x 6.375" piece of ordinary cardboard to serve as the floor, in lieu of the second roof being used as such.

Not enough sense? When has that ever stopped me?

Well, maybe it should have slowed me down a bit. Then I might have gotten the proper red brick under the front stairs. And I might have used the least chipped Dii lined brick in the most obvious position on the lower front, rather than the most chipped.

Ah, well. I kind of needed to build something & it was fun.

Good block play.

Lott's Tudor

Recently I bought a small batch of Lott's Tudor Blocks, more or less as a pig in a poke -- I couldn't tell which stones were included, nor did I know which stones I would need to actually build from the plans.

But there was a "Set 1" instruction booklet and a brochure describing the Lott's Bricks line, so it was tempting. And in truth, the benefit I get is from block play is often from the total process of building, photographing, blogging. So maybe if there were only enough of the distinctive Tudor half-timber stones to only do one photographic angle, and I had to cut stand-ins from wood for the backs, I'd still get some good use from them.

On arrival, I was delighted to determine that the batch does indeed include the required specially "lined" and specially shaped pieces to build all the structures in the Set 1 booklet, and among the bricks was only missing a few plain unlined pieces I can borrow from my other Lott's sets (which I have previously blogged here & here) and the chimney piece and roof.

The roof wasn't too much of a challenge -- I swiped a piece of dark red card stock from my wife's craft supplies and cut it to size. It lacks the thickness and shingle lines of the included roofs, but will do for a while. The highest numbered Tudor sets include thatched roofs, which would certainly be appropriate for this cottage and would also be a good project.

The chimney was a bigger surprise, since I had somehow thought that the piece "L" chimneys I had would work. But of course the roof angle is different, so the notch needed to be sharper to not wobble. And the Tudor chimney is 1" thick not 1/2" like the standard chimney (Lott's stones are on an inch -- 25.4 mm -- basis, so do not work well with Anker 25mm pitch stones). Same part designation, but not the same part. So I had to wander down to the wood shop (pretty much my wife's as well, but she wasn't home).

I found a scrap that was an inch thick that could have a 1" cube cut out of it, and proceeded to do so. I cut the approximate notch, sanded the various cut surfaces on my wife's belt sander (she is fierce), and quickly had something that would do before all the window light for photography was gone. I may sand some more to get the size correct, or maybe just let it do as-is.

I have long coveted a Lott's Tudor set, so am delighted to have cobbled together one to build with. Excuse enough to blog twice in one day! (And third post in three days, after several weeks lull.)

Good block play.