A couple addicted to Lego have this celebrated the festive season – by making a giant Christmas cake out of thousands of the little plastic blocks..
Mike Addis, 57 and his wife Catherine Weightman, 52, spent more than 200 hours and used more than 100,000 bricks building the cake and a festive woodland scene.
Mr Addis revealed the couple, who have made festive lego creations for the last 21 years, said they wanted to experiment with different colours this year.
This lead to them creating a Christmas cake adorned by Santa, a snowman, an elf measuring five-feet-high, along with a four-foot-high Christmas tree.
The pair have also created a woodland fens scene with Santa riding his reindeer through the night sky.
Mike said: “I thought if we did a Christmas cake, we could involve the green and the brown, then have characters sitting on top of it.
“It was just a way of still being able to have a big model, but incorporate those rarer colours.
“The same with the Christmas tree which is about four foot tall, we thought we wouldn’t have enough green and brown to do that but if we do it at four foot we can, because a lot of our models are seven to eight foot.”
Catherine works for Natural England and persuaded Mike to construct one of their models with an environmental message.
He said: “We’ve really enjoyed doing the Wick and Fen model, Catherine has always wanted to get across an environmental message.
That was the inspiration, with the wild as well, we’ve got things like horses and wolves on it, wild cattle and things.
“The Christmas cake is pretty boring this year because it’s just a square but the rest of it we’ve really enjoyed doing, the figures, the presents and the tree.”
Mike revealed that the pair have already started planning for next year’s display, using their experiences this year with different colours to create a much larger structure.
“We’re not going to stop. We’ve already started planning for next year.
“We’re going to learn from what we’ve done this year and we’re probably going to do a full-size Christmas tree, one about eight foot high.”
After 21 years of building lego structures, Mike and Catherine, of Huntingdon, Cambs., will now feature as part of a Channel 4 documentary.
Airing on Boxing Day, the show will feature family lego traditions.
Mike, a semi-retired business studies and economics teacher added: “We’ve enjoyed it, we got on really well with the two ladies that came and it’s been nice because they’re so enthusiastic, it’s actually been fun doing it.”
In the past 21 years, previous creations have included a Dalek, an angel and a postbox – 21 years since they started making the over-sized structures.
