New 2018 LEGO® flower and leaf elements

Chris McVeigh got his hands on some 2018 LEGO® sets already and gives us a quick look at two exciting new pieces of foliage inside them.

LEGO has introduced a new flower element and matching leaf element, and it looks as though they’ll be quickly rolled into many 2018 sets (including 10260 Downtown Diner). Happily, they’re now hitting shelves in the newest Juniors Friends sets, which I picked up so that I could examine the parts in detail.

Contest: Kill Teal (Volume 2)

25 February 2018 

ENTRY IS NOW CLOSED. All received entries will be published on the blog in a few days' time.

After a long absence, in 2018 The LEGO® Group will be reintroducing teal-coloured LEGO elements (Bright Bluish Green [TLG]/ Dark Turquoise [BL]) and the team here at New Elementary are so excited, we're running a competition!

You may recall the 'Mark Stafford Killed Teal' story (if not, it is reproduced below) which inspired Elspeth De Montes to create this LEGO model recently...

Elspeth's creation provoked quite a funny reaction. When New E contributor Jeremy Williams saw it he began to wonder about other ways that Mark Stafford might have killed teal, and suggested this contest to me. And when Mark Stafford it on Twitter, it raised strange anxieties in him:

Beware builders, I fear one day teal may rise again! Zombie-teal. With strange eons even death may die. :) I would have to kill it again!

— Mark John Stafford (@LEGO_Nabii) July 27, 2017

So that's what we want you to build for this competition:
How might Mark Stafford kill teal again?

10256 Taj Mahal

With the surprise re-release of the LEGO® Taj Mahal, fans have been wondering why The LEGO Group settled on this particular classic set, and whether anything has been changed. Sven Franic is here to shed some light on a set containing no new elements or techniques. The 5,923-piece set is now available priced £299.99 / US$369.99 / 329.99€.

What I love most about the Creator Expert theme’s “Landmark” series, or Sculptures as they used to be called back in 2008 when 10189 Taj Mahal was first released, is that they include a low number of lots and very high brick counts. This is great for amassing substantial quantities of bricks of the same type by buying just one copy of the set. This is simply a symptom of a very large and intricate model, but this type of inventory also probably played a major role in the decision to bring it out of the vault after nine years, despite all the conspiracy theories running wild over the internet about what was behind this move. 
To understand why, we have to go back in time for a second.