From the Bronx to the Brick

LEGO® Story # 33

A rising star in the LEGO®-sphere is about to Super Nova! Her name is Mati Stack. Her LEGO® journey began at the age of seven when her “papi”(Spanish for father) gifted her first LEGO® set.

She hails from the Bronx, in New York City and is of Puerto Rican descent, just like “JLO from the block,” and is affectionately our LEGO® JLO from the “Brick” (pun intended). Even more intriguing about Mati is she attended the prestigious Aviation High School in New York City, where she learned technical skills, including the building of aircraft out of wood and metal structures.

Photo submitted by: Mati Stack

She learned to work with her hands, and building is now simply an intuitive skill for her. Mati is a lifelong Star Wars fan. And in 2015 she was inducted back into the LEGO®-sphere through the Star Wars micro sets. She became infatuated with the ability to build using LEGO® bricks. Then, in 2016, she attended her first LEGO® convention, where she was introduced to artists and artwork using LEGO® as the creative canvas.

Influenced by these artists, she repeatedly attended more conventions as a novice artist herself. At the premiere of LEGO® Masters she connected with a few contestants, and her passion blossomed.

She became an exhibitor at conventions and immersed herself into making LEGO® art and tryout for the LEGO® master show as well. Her LEGO® building team is affectionately named the “Puerto Brickans,” paying homage to her own cultural heritage. Mati and her daughter are the creative power house of this team. They made it as far as alternates and strive to appear in the LEGO® show. She received commissions to build LEGO® art pieces for wealthy clients in the past two years and was encouraged to display her works in a studio. Her LEGO® passion filled every part of her life.

Photo submitted by: Mati Stack

While spending weekends creating LEGO® art with her granddaughter, she saw that something more was happening: They created art and icons of the time they spent together and served as a memory of the smiles and laughter they shared together. That’s when her concept of building friendships and memories with LEGO® bricks was born. She then launched the “Brick Cre8” concept and business model.

Mati Stack – Florida, USA


Find out more about Mati’s new venture, Brick Create:

Instagram: @brickcre8

Facebook: Brick Create


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

How One LEGO® Commercial Can Change Your Life: The Story of a Master Builder

LEGO® Story #17

Back when I was a kid, I loved to play with LEGO® together with my friends. I especially loved to build with my friend Jos, since he had a lot of LEGO®.

We thought we were really building some cool builds, like GBC’s (great ball contraptions) with many moving or rotating parts. However, when we became teenagers we got more interested in video games like Minecraft, and LEGO® became more of a side hobby.

Afbeelding met boom, natuur

Automatisch gegenereerde beschrijving

A chateau I made in Minecraft years ago.

That changed one night when I saw a commercial on TV about a new TV-show in The Netherlands and Belgium, called LEGO® Masters.

They were recruiting candidates, and Jos and I decided to try and apply, although we didn’t think we had any chance to be invited to the auditions. We didn’t even complete the application form, since it was very lengthy and we didn’t think we had any photos or videos of good builds to attach. To our surprise, we got called and we were asked to complete the form.

This gave us the idea that we actually had a chance to be invited to the auditions, and we did. We got through the two audition rounds, and we were invited to participate in the TV-show. The auditions were a lot of fun, but we also saw a lot of great teams and builds there, so we were really worried that we might be the first team to have to leave the show. 

Afbeelding met tekst

Automatisch gegenereerde beschrijving

Jos (right) and me (left) as team in LEGO® Masters NL/BE

The first episode the challenge was to build a mega city; every team had to build a huge building to complete the city. We never really built LEGO® buildings ourselves, in fact, we hardly built anything with LEGO® at all the last few years. So, when the buildings were finished, we didn’t make it into the top 3.

However, the challenge had a twist which was that we had to build an attack on the city. This was our chance to make a difference since we like to build organics and sculptures. We built a huge sculpted octopus which attacked our building. The octopus was really unstable, but in the end we got it into the mega city without breaking. This build won us the Golden Brick, which we could use to skip the elimination of one episode before episode 6.

 The octopus attack we made in the first episode (Image source: RTL – The Netherlands)

The Golden Brick helped us a lot, it gave us confidence and security. We had to use it in episode 4, when we had to build an apartment building and we thought we thought we didn’t do a great job. Luckily, we didn’t have to build any more buildings after that episode. We did much better than we had expected, we even won episode 6 and got second place in episode 7. Our prehistory build in episode 7 was definitely one of our favorites, including a moving T-Rex. Episode 8 was the final, and we decided to sculpt an enormous red dragon attacking a small gnome village.

In the end, we got second place and just missed the prizes. However, we felt that we got much further than we expected and we did all we could have done. 

After LEGO® Masters, we got a few requests to do some LEGO® workshops on schools, which was really fun to do.

Then, we got a request by a big Dutch yacht-building company. They asked us, and the third-placed team of the Dutch/Belgian LEGO® Masters (Björn and Corneel), to build their biggest yacht to date: project Cosmos. This is a super yacht under construction, and will be 80 meters long.

When we visited the shipyard, we were really curious in what scale we had to build the yacht. Our idea was that we had to build the yacht in a scale of 1:100 or smaller, which would mean 80 centimeters, which we thought was quite large.

However, they were thinking of a LEGO® yacht in the scale 1:50, or minifigure scale (approximately 1:42), which would mean a LEGO® model of almost 2 meters. We were really surprised to hear this, we never build anything that big before. We never even worked with stud.io or other LEGO® design software before. Designing and building the yacht was a great learning experience, time-consuming and hard work, but of course also loads of fun. In the end, we used more than 12.000 bricks, and the model was 1.90m long and weighed 23 kilograms. 

The 1.90m long LEGO® model of yacht project Cosmos

We were really glad with how we did, but we had no idea how the other team was doing. When we saw the other model, we could immediately see differences, but also a lot of similarities. Both models had some very cool elements. Our model included lighting, opening doors and valves, extendable sun awnings, and an helicopter and jet skis. The other team’s model included some very detailed furniture and great building techniques.

Currently, an online competition for the two models is held to find out which model is better according to the public. Even if we don’t win, I think building this yacht was a great challenge and experience for us as builders, and really made us more complete builders. 

Afbeelding met tekst

Automatisch gegenereerde beschrijving

The 2 LEGO® models of project Cosmos by the 2 LEGO® Masters teams

Because of this great experience, we are now trying to create more publicity for us as LEGO® model builders, to potentially get some more LEGO® model building commissions. We made a Dutch website to highlight who we are and what we have built, https://complexstackers.webnode.nl/, and we really hope to receive some more great LEGO® challenges in the future.

Martijn Brinkman – Deventer, Netherlands