Lego Rose feature image

How to Build a Lego Rose

Instructions, Lego Wedding

One year after the Lego themed wedding…. life feels the same, but with a lot less Lego! I kept a single Lego Vase which now sits in our hallway, and a number of friends still have their Lego Roses in their living rooms/ bedrooms.  The rest reside broken into bricks within large crates in our spare room upstairs – one day I will find them useful for a new project!

Lego Rose Instructions

It’s been a long time since I revisited my blog, so a few weeks ago I decided to log in and see if there was an activity.  To my surprise I found a number of comments and emails from around the world, requesting instructions for my Lego Rose!  You can now build your own Lego Rose by following the below instructions. Image and YouTube video available:

Design Tweaks

The Lego Rose was never designed to be rebuilt by others, so I have made two small tweaks for stability and added realism.

Improved Leaves:  I used a single piece leaf part for my original Lego Rose design (part 2417).  This was primarily to help separate the roses from each other when arranged together in my vases.  However they never looked authentic though, so the instructions include a new leaf design for added realism.

Glue: No glue was used for any of my Lego Roses and Vases at the wedding.   The design worked well…. until many of my drunken guests grabbed a rose by the stem, resulting in a smashed rose on the floor!  If you build the Lego Rose and intend to give it to someone else as a gift, I recommend you super glue the plastic pipe to a Technic Bush clip inside the base of the rose.

Which Lego Bricks?

You can find all the parts you need within the footer of the instructions.  To make life even easier I have also listed the part numbers below.  I source all my bricks as new or second hand on bricklink.com.

Rose Head

IDNameColourQuantity
3023Plate 1 x 2Red4
3710Plate 1 x 4Red6
3021Plate 2 x 3Red4
3020Plate 2 x 4Red12
3709bPlate 2 x 4 with 3 HolesRed1
41769Wedge, Plate 4 x 2 RightRed8
41770Wedge, Plate 4 x 2 LeftRed4
4733Brick 1 x 1Black4
3001Brick 2 x 4Red2
3003Brick 2 x 2Red1
3622Brick 1 x 3Red4
61678Slope, Curved 4 x 1Red4
54200Slope 30 1 x 1 x 2/3Red12

Rose Stem

IDNameColourQuantity
3062bBrick, Round 1 x 1 Open StudGreen15+
3941Brick, Round 2 x 2 with Axle HoleGreen1
3709bPlate 2 x 4 with 3 HolesGreen2
4032Plate, Round 2 x 2 with Axle HoleGreen18
3713Technic BushGrey1
NA* Plastic Beam – 18 cm +Any1
NASuper GlueAny1

Tamiya 3mm Plastic Beams

I struggled to find enough plastic beams on bricklink.com for the size and amount I required for the wedding.  If you have the same problem, I found an alternative at a crafts store when I lived in Japan – Tamiya Plastic Beams 3mm Round.   You can also get this online from various online craft stores.  The Tamiya beams fit the Lego Rose stem well, but don’t expect the Technic bush to clip on.  If you want to hold the Lego Rose by the stem, glue the Technic bush to the end of the plastic beam inside the rose as illustrated by the instructions.

Go Build a Lego Rose!

Now it’s up to you.  I have created the instructions and listed the parts.  Let me know how you get on, share a picture and let me know if you have any questions.  Have a read of my other posts like Perfecting the Lego Rose for the Wedding for more details.
 

Lego wedding table plan setup with four Lego vases with 17 Lego Roses & Thistles each. Taken at Wedding Venue

Lego Wedding: The Big Day

Lego Wedding

One year of building 4 vases, 68 roses, 16 thistles, 42 personalised minifigure guests, 1 table plan, 13 large letters and 8 boxes of Lego, the mega Lego Wedding build was complete!

I will keep this post short and to the point, as the images speak to themselves.  The Lego Rose & Thistle Vases were setup per table, with their personalised favours.  I also added some last minute Lego letters for the top table spelling out our new name – Mr & Mrs Johnson.  Wooden letter boxes full of Lego bricks were also provided for our guests…. even if it did mean I ended up with a variety of Lego cocks by the end of the evening!

Our Lego Wedding Cake finished everything off nicely, courtesy of Cake & Lace from Newbury.  The three layered cake had two personalised and edible Lego version of myself and my wife.  Each layer had sections peeled back revealing a Lego brick interior.  It was perfect and tasted great to!

Time to finally close this chapter and plan my next Lego build.

Photography Credit:  Adam Hillier Photography

Mark!

Lego Wedding Party Minifigures

Lego Wedding Minifigure Personalisation

Lego Wedding

A Lego themed wedding wouldn’t be complete without personalised mini-figure guests!

Every guest who attended the wedding got a personalised Lego version of themselves to take home.  Unfortunately I was unable to construct everyone as a Lego Star Wars character (courtesy of my childhood), so logged into BrickLink.com and ordered a set of heads, hair, torsos and legs.  Using everyone’s Facebook profile photos online, I built the whole wedding party (44 day guests) in a few days.

In addition to this each guest received 4 bags of Lego chocolate which we found on Amazon sold by Gwynedd Building Blocks.  We ordered a small taster kit initially and then a 2 kilogram box!  We would both highly recommend them to anyone else.  Yum!

Lego Wedding Table Plan

Once my army of Lego minifigure wedding guests was complete, I started to build the table plan.  At first I expected this to take a few hours, but this escalated quickly into a few evenings after work and a whole weekend!

I started by setting up a mini photo studio in my living room (you will notice by now I have a very forgiving wife!) and started to snap comical scenes with each wedding guest.  Every scene was personal to that individual person.  Highlights include:

  • Arresting the Groom:  Father-in-law was setup to arrests me whilst my wife and mother-in-law looked on laughing.
  • Catching the Bouquet:  Yet to be married women attempting to catch my wife’s bouquets.
  • Hide the Sausage!  Two of my friends from school were set up to play hide the sausage… granted in this case I was just having fun!

You get the idea.  You can see all of these at the end of this blog post.

Once I had finished with all these photos, I added them to my table plan using the photo editing software Gimp (emphasis on the words photo editing).  Even the tables and miniature flowers on the plan were Lego! I finished the design off by using a Lego font across the by naming everyone on the plan.  You can learn how to do this by following this useful post by Persialou.

You can see the table plan, the flowers and other extras in my final post next month where the whole Lego wedding comes together.

Mark

Lego Vase Feature Image

Lego Rose & Thistle Vase Completion!

Lego Wedding

Now used to the Japanese working way of life of working late in the office every evening, I needed a way to unwind after a long day of work.  Why not replicate my perfected Lego Rose 68 times?! I got to the point where I could replicate the design within 5 minutes, and had a make shift assembly line setup on my apartments living room table.

Whilst I replicated the design, I went through various iterations of vase design.  I won’t bore you with each iteration, so feel free to jump to the completed vase design further down this post!  Key difficulty worth noting though was working out how to control the Lego Roses, without them continuously falling out (especially important when you have a room full of drunken guests!).  Using a netted inter-connecting Technic Plate design for strength, you can see the interior controlling mechanism below.

Lego Rose & Thistle Vase Complete!

After many months of rose designs and vase iterations, the Lego Rose Vases were complete! I built four unique vases in total, each with their own distinctive design.  Originally I had settled on 12 roses per vase, but it lacked oomph!  Adding an extra 5 to make it 17 filled in the gaps nicely.

Knowing that I was to be married to a Scotish bride, I added a small finishing touch by incorporating 4 Scottish Thistles.  Using a few Lego trees from my childhood collection and inverting an underwater bush on top worked well.  It did mean I had to add my second non Lego component to the design though as each thistle head had to be spray painted purple to fit the part.  Simple yet effective, this pulled the design together.  Now it was complete!

*Bonus Test Vase*

Whilst testing the design in my apartment in Japan, I took a few Lego Roses and experimental flowers.  Enjoy my final bonus vase! (includes Lego bee!)

Mark

Lego Rose feature image

Perfecting the Lego Rose for the Wedding

Lego Wedding

An English Rose for a wedding between an English groom and a Scottish bride… this was always going to go down well with her side of the border!  Over a six month period on and off and whilst moving to Japan part way through, I built four different variations of my Lego Rose.  The end result was an elegant Lego rose which was also somewhat and “wedding guest proof”.

It all started with this simple design, using a similar approach to the Lego Tulip. A little too small for my table centerpiece though… let’s make it bigger! I simply built upon the initial version by adding extra petals to give a three layered petal design with an interior centre twist.  The second iterations increased size worked, but felt overly ‘blocky’ (yes I know I was building with Lego). The new stem looked great though.

Lego Rose v3

How to make Lego look less ‘blocky’? I think my third iteration answers this question, with a slimmed down version with rounded petals. I achieved this by layering up basic slate bricks and combing them with trapezium slate bricks to add extra curves. Adding some small sloped tile bricks increased the effect.  These four petal cores were attached to an improved central block with a twisting centre.  Using the small tiles in the centre, I also found these really elegant curved bricks which I overlapped to pull the design together.  This design was a significant improvement on its predecessor!

Final Lego Rose Design (v4)

Elegance is all well and good, yet when it can’t stand up by itself it is beyond useless for a wedding!  The final Lego Rose was a minor tweak on its predecessor, with the aim to add strength.

I found some old plastic tubes which I think were part of a Lego submarine I got in Torquay as a child and inserted one within the stem of the rose. This added the much needed rigidity to the stem. I managed to find a suitable set of similar plastic tubes from Joshin across the road from my apartment in Kobe, Japan.  To get the rose head to connect to the stem I had to tweak the inside of the rose base a little for the tube to sit inside.  A little elegance was lost in the base of the flower, but this was quickly resolved with a larger green cylinder.

Other updates to the design included minor tweaks to the petals for simplicity and strength. There were a few drop tests involved and was surprisingly sturdy!

Happy with the design it was time to replicate and build 68 of my Lego Roses and design 4 vases!  You can read about this in my next blog post. Let me know your thoughts and comments on my final Lego Rose design.

Mark

Lego flowers blog post

Experimental Lego Flower Design

Lego Wedding

After distracting my wife to be with a shiny engagement ring, it was time to order a ton of Lego and start the design phase of my year long Lego Wedding project!

Once I got over the new brick excitement, I knocked together a small simple Lego flower with 7 petals clipped onto a Lego technic steering wheel.  Simple yet dull.

I then got more creative and developed two new intricate and effective techniques. The yellow Tulip (open and closed versions) took 4 core petals which were attached to a central core with outward facing studs. I liked this lots. I then tried another technique by layering various slate bricks upon each other to build a larger red flower (not a clue if this resembles any real world flower). This technique allowed me to create petals of any shape. These quick mock ups would form the basis of the next two flowers I would design…

Lego Gerberas

Flicking through images of Gerberas flowers on Pintrest, I concluded it would be good candidate for my layered petal technique. My initial version used a two tiered petal design clipped onto a octagon shaped Lego brick. I then added another technic steering wheel to it’s centre to complete the flower (left pic). Whilst this worked well, it wasn’t round or full enough. I therefore tweaked the petal design and added extras to create the full Gerberas look (right pic). This design also leveraged a Lego pipe which was secured to a technique wheel and octagon. Only issue was it was a little heavy, yet still quite a realistic copy of a real life Gerberas.

Lego Rose

Designing a Lego Rose was always going to be a flower I would want to attempt for the Lego Wedding!  My Lego Rose was built using the same technique as the Tulip, with a central core of outward facing studs attaching 4 core petals. The picture below is the second version of my Lego Rose. I take this design further in my next blog post focused on perfecting Lego Rose design…

Lego Engagement Ring Box Open Close Up

Lego Engagement Ring Box

Lego Wedding

What better way to persuade my future wife to have a Lego themed wedding, than proposing to her with an engagement ring in a Lego box!

The ring box went through various iterations, utilising various red, black and white tiled bricks left over from my childhood Lego collection. The box sits at 6 x 6 studs wide and 3 bricks high to match the dimensions of a standard ring box.  The ring (not made of Lego!) sits on a mini raised plinth made from a 2 x 2 brick and a few 1 x 2 slates for a secure ish fit. Luckily her costume jewellery worked as a perfect substitute while designing this box whilst I spent a few weeks going in and out of shops looking for the perfect engagement ring.

The box and the ring was a success and she said “yes” when I proposed in Budapest on a four wheeled bicycle on November 2014. The Lego wedding theme snow balled from here…