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