Like Diana Gabaldon‘s series of novels and the Outlander TV series returning to Starz this weekend, the story of LEGO Outlander involves a bit of time travel. Fortunately for you, we’re only going back to Christmas 2013, when I presented the 1500-piece LEGO Downton Abbey model and minifigure cast to my girlfriend, Sofia. Without bragging too much, it was an incredible gift, and Internet (and even some non-Internet, paper-based) publications loved it. Over the next few weeks, I was asked a dozen times how I could possibly beat it the following year.

Fall 2014 came around, and that question weighed on me. The LEGO Derekminifigure photo I published in the spring got a little attention, and LEGO Seinfeld in the summer got a little bit more, but I had nothing for Sofia. Then, on a rewatch of the premiere episode of Outlander, it seemed pretty obvious to me. My girlfriend was a big fan of the books and was giddy with the idea of seeing these characters coming to life.

I designed a small vignette, using sand green on one half and bright green on the other to capture the tone of the series: Subdued colors for the present (the series protagonist Claire’s present being 1945), and bright colors for the past (1743, where she finds herself after a tumble through a giant stone).

I didn’t build it for Christmas, with time being tougher to find, and sand green bricks being very expensive. I showed Sofia the rendered image a few weeks later, and she insisted we build it. By then, I was already devoted to getting LEGO Community finished, not knowing when the new season would be returning. We scrapped the design I had, and balanced her knowledge of the novels with my eye for detail in reference photos. We designed it the weekend after Community was published, had most of the bricks in-hand a week later, and raced against a setting sun to shoot photos to get this out for the Internet to enjoy before the mid-season hiatus ended.

No one has asked what we’ll be doing next, yet, but I’m sure we can come up with something pretty great.

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