Several times over the years I had made items to be auctioned off for my daughters’ nursery school fundraiser where the parents of each class put together a raffle basket based on a theme (“reading”, “wine”, “coffee lover” have been themes in the past for example). For my younger daughter’s final year at the school, I knew I needed to go big with my donation so I reached out to her teacher early in the school year to start thinking of ideas. I asked her what the theme would be this year and she threw out several options until she said “we could always do LEGO, the kids love that”. As a life-long fan of LEGO, I jumped on that one. I immediately envisioned a giant lego figure that was also a cabinet and quickly sketched the drawing above.

First and foremost I wanted to make sure that everything was proportional to a true LEGO figure, so I got out my digital calipers and started measuring every aspect of the figure. Then I used a spreadsheet to scale up the dimensions based on a few different final height options. Initially I had planned on just building a generic lego figure as seen here, but a few weeks into it I realized there was one figure that the kids would love more than anything else.

And that’s how I ended up building a giant Emmet Brickowski from The LEGO Movie. This Emmet is over 36 times larger than the actual figure.

Emmet’s legs, torso, and head open up for storing your LEGOs inside, and, in order to be as accurate as possible, both the arms and hands rotate like an actual LEGO figure.

All said and done, Emmet stands a little over 60” tall as shown here with me for scale.

Emmet ended up raising a good amount of money for the school and at the end of the day one of the kids from my daughter’s kindergarten class was the winner. As you can see here, he and his older brother were very excited about it. This was a super fun project and I’m already toying with the idea of making another giant LEGO man for my shop, based on the figure I made of myself when I built a scale model of my own house from LEGOs for my kids.