Flower Displays

 

Lego has recently been pushing some flower builds. The big one, of course, is build 10280, the Flower Bouquet. They've also followed up with Roses 40460, Sunflowers 40524, and Tulips 40461. So when I acquired all of these sets nearly at-once, I had to figure out how I wanted to display them. 

I got and built the red roses, sunflowers, and tulips first, and displayed them in a small horn mug we have that unfortunately leaks. These three builds together make up seven stems, almost all of which have leaves. These were very cute in the cup. The petals of the roses can be adjusted in tight, or droopy like roses often get. And the sunflowers, if not handled carefully, will often see individual petals pop off - much like the real flowers. I was really pleased with these sets, so I put the Flower Bouquet on my wish list, since I wasn't ready to pay full price for it. I do recommend these builds as cooperative builds, since there's a lot of repetition from one flower to the other. The two roses aren't quite the same, but very similar - I believe their stems differ. Same with the other sets; enough similarity to build together, but enough differences to make each one worthwhile.

But then Amazon Prime day happened, and the Flower Bouquet went on sale. So of course I bought it. The full bouquet consists of three pink roses, two stems of daisies, five more flowers, and then five stems of greenery. They have very long stems, much longer than the smaller sets, and some of the flowers have leaves as well (made from green pterodactyl wings!). Again with the repetition, especially on the stems, but where there's more than one of a flower, there's at least a different bend in one stem and other small things. I've been suffering from some arthritis in my thumb lately, making building difficult, but being able to just build one flower or piece of greenery, then come back later for more, was really helpful for me at this time.

So now I had a bunch of long-stemmed flowers that were too many and too long for my little cup. Turning to Amazon, I searched for vases for set 10280. I found several, but kept stopping at these tower builds made from bricks. They were attractive and could be done in any colors, some with flowers attached on the outside, or using windows and bricks. 

But it seemed silly to spend $50 or more on a set built with bricks I already had, so I just looked at those very closely, determining that they were mostly built with ten 1x2 bricks and ten single-pip round bricks, stacked up to about 20 high, with optional SNOT bricks substituted where wanted, the round pieces letting it bend to form a circle. I played around for a while, just using the bricks I had available. After a few rows, I started over, but I upped it to twelve brick-and-round combos around. 

Then I took it apart and built it again, adding some supports to go across the tube every half-dozen levels, helping the tower to keep its shape, which was now somewhat oval. I hoped the supports might also help support the flower stems, so they wouldn't all be just drooping over the sides. With this shape, I was able to connect a few single pips on the bottom to rest the whole thing on a quickly-engineered base. This arrangement stretched the bottom row of bricks just a little, enough to qualify as illegal brick usage, but wasn't noticeable unless you're looking for it.

So that left me with two vases of Lego flowers, very pretty.

But of course I wasn't satisfied. I wanted a single brick-built vase that would hold all of the flowers. But it would have to have two different heights, or I'd have to extend the stems from the smaller sets. I first thought about keeping the round tower and building a shorter frame around it to put the shorter flowers in. But I wasn't super-pleased with the stress the round shape was putting on things, and if I was going to building something new, it might as well fix that issue. Also, the color combinations I chose for the tower were a little garish - which is fine, since it was supposed to be a test-run anyway, just to see if I could do it. 

So I got into my parts bins and started looking at some larger pieces I had. I thought about taking some of my leftover princess & castle pieces that currently are amalgamated into a tower holding some extra princess set pieces I didn't want to take apart, like Aurora's bed, a grandfather clock, a dresser, and so on. But if I used the walls (including Rapunzel's murals) to make a castle flower display, I'd need a home for the interiors, and the mini-tower is pretty cool, anyway. I worked hard to get that one to open and close in a way that made me happy.

But I still liked the castle idea, so I looked for some interesting walls to keep it from being just a large grey box. There are some quarter-circle wall pieces that are six bricks high that I wanted to use to round the corners, since it wasn't going to be a fully-round build. Then I ran across these weird gargoyle pieces. I've got six of them from some lego-compatible set long ago, and they have a gargoyle or dragon or something on them. I played with the idea of trying to make the display hexagonal, but Lego doesn't play super great with angles, though that did cause me to get out my box of bricks with an angled footprint - more on those later. Instead I decided I would feature those in an L-shaped build, setting them into the walls with one side two-high and the other one, giving me both a short and a tall display option.

This meant getting out all my grey 1x bricks, of all shades, along with black to outline the build a bit. My first mock-up, I used grey and white and yellow, but quickly decided just greys and black would be better. As I started building it up, the assorted greys with the gargoyles really took on a neat shape. It did point out some of the color differences in my older and newer light-grey, dark-grey, and compatible-brick grey bricks. I did use almost all of my 1x6, 1x4, and 1x3 bricks in grey shades, though I still have many 1x2s, some of them still in that round tower.

The corners were fun and interesting. I used those six-brick-high quarter-circles, some bricks the same shape but one-brick-high, and some angled pieces above and below them to help lock them into place (that's the ones I mentioned earlier). I now wish I'd done the bottommost row in black, and if there had been space for one more grey row under the top black bit, it would be great, but I legit didn't have enough bricks to finish that one out - I may go back to fix that one later. 

One way I did make the best use I could of my brick supply was to fill in the back of the build with green and black bricks, saving the grey ones for the front and sides. Once there are flowers in the display, the colors on the back won't be noticeable. 

And here's the finished build! I added crenelations around the top to increase the castle feeling and maybe help position the flowers so they don't all bunch up together. Looking at it now, they aren't really visible with the flowers in there, so those might get removed later, especially if I go back to add another layer of grey just below the black top rows there. I think the black top gives it a nice line, and the corners of the build add a lot of interest. I wouldn't mind replacing all the dark grey with light grey, except black on the base. but I love the gargoyles inset in the walls. And here you can see the green on the back wall, but only because it's empty. Here you can see that I did choose to set the front of the vase back four pips from the front edge, rather than two pips like I did around the rest of it. I want a little space to add things to the front of it when it's done.

So nothing left but to add some flowers! I started by transferring the tallest flowers first, but quickly figured out that I needed to add the shortest flowers in each bunch first, threading the stems of the taller pieces in afterward. It's just a little crowded, but not so much that it doesn't work. It's just really completely filled in.

Next I put it on my shelf and added a few tiny flower builds I already had onto the base to fill in a little, then moved some small builds around it to fill in the space.