A Rose By Any Other Name [review 40460, 40461]

When we got our first look at the Flower Bouquet, one of the first questions that people asked was ‘Why are the roses that colour? Surely they should be red.’ I should know, I was one of those people!

A few weeks ago, while we were taking part in a round table discussion (along with other Fan Media) with the designer of that set, Anderson Grubb, a few things came up in the discussion:

One of the overarching design goals was for it to surprise people with what subtlety, what simplicity, what elegance we can achieve with LEGO Bricks.  Those are adjectives I don’t think you would hear a lot of people necessarily use about a LEGO toy. Many other positive adjectives (were goals) like elegant, sophisticated – I hope we achieved that. One of the things that came first to mind was that we have this beautiful soft peach colour, and we’ve barely used it. We’ve certainly never used it like this….

Anderson Grubb, designer of the 10280 Flower Bouquet set.

And so, in part that challenge was to drive that set towards surprise, subtlety and sophistication. And while you cannot deny the subtlty of that colour, it is probably not what many people would expect from a rose.

As we approach February, and with that, the 14th – Valentines Day , we find our selves reminded that

Roses are red, Violets are blue

This poem can’t express my Feelings for you

Anon.

And so, at this point our attention turns to roses, and indeed rose buds, which are a traditional gift at this time of the year..

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Create A LEGO® Vase For The Chance To Win The New LEGO® Botanical Collection

The recently released LEGO® Botanical Collection has certainly got a lot of people excited about having a bunch of flowers on their shelf that won’t require water to to keep them looking fresh and colourful. But, One thing became apparent to me: Being able to arrange them in a vase is just as important.

There are so many ways in which flowers can be displayed, as my Mum’s collection of vases demonstrated the other day. But, when your flowers are going to live forever, you perhaps shouldn’t remove the valuable glassware from circulation permanently. And so I would like to launch my first competition for the year:

Build a vase, using LEGO bricks to suit LEGO Flowers: builds can be real or digital, and should suit the LEGO Flower Bouquet. You don’t need a copy of the set to enter. Digital entries should be rendered as .jpg or .png files.

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