LEGO Flower Bouquet

The most important part of our wedding, other than the actual marriage part, was my bouquet and my bridesmaids bouquets.

While most brides visit florists and bring in wedding magazine photos and color swatches to pick flowers and arrangements and such, I did none of that. About a year before we even got engaged, I had found a picture of a LEGO vase with LEGO flowers in it. I decided to try to recreate it, but it didn't turn out quite like the picture. Nevertheless, I loved the concept of LEGO flowers and decided that we should use LEGO flowers at our wedding instead of real flowers.

Photo by Karla Nunez

Now the idea seemed so simple, but a few hundred LEGOs, assemble them into flower shapes, attach some sort of stem thing, tie them together and you're done. Well, it didn't turn out that simple.

Photo by Margaret Jacobsen - our photographer

Assembling the LEGOs was the easy part, but then we had to epoxy each petal on so that they wouldn't fall apart as easily. Kevin thankfully has the precision and skill to complete this task. We had to put two points of epoxy on the underside of each petal to try to help them stay together.

Once the flowers were all made, it was time to make stems. We settled on a twisted metal wire thing that we found at Lowe's. I cut enough pieces to make all of the stems, with only a few injuries in the process. The only problem was how to connect the stems perpendicular to the flower itself. Kevin had heard about epoxy putty and figured out how to make this step work. It was almost like using silly putty, but extra sticky and smelly. It took a couple weeks to complete this step, since every flower had to be attached and then almost sculpted to make the connections pretty and consistent.

Photo by Kerri Quezada

Now we had a ton of LEGO flowers on stems. Success. It should all be easy breezy from here. Wrong. The flowers won't just bend into bouquet. So I had an idea to use foam hemispheres and stick each flower through in it's particular spot. This would give us the shape we envisioned. This step went pretty smoothly.

But you couldn't just pull all the stems together at the bottom, since the flowers would just spring back together after we removed the foam. So we painstakingly bent each stem to a center point and secured them together with a rubber band. They were finally starting to look like bouquets.

We started cutting out the foam and the flowers began to come back together once the foam was gone. I will admit it, I had a breakdown and was crying and thought the world was going to end. Kevin was able to use his amazing skills and bend each flower to it's exact position. Thank goodness he is a talented LEGO flower bouquet creator, or I might have passed out.

Photo by John Shen

After many weeks of dealing with each of steps, we were finally almost done. We secured the flowers together at the stem level with some sort of construction adhesive, to keep them from wiggling, and then we wrapped the stems with awesome red ribbon. Finally we had LEGO bouquets.

A project that I thought would take a couple of weeks ended up taking about 9 months to complete, but in the end it was totally worth it. We had created beautiful LEGO flower bouquets that matched not only our wedding, but who we are as people. I had been very cautious to make sure nobody saw the bouquets until the wedding day, and they were a hit. From all of the guests to the catering staff, everybody was fascinated with the bouquets and asking lots of questions about them. It made all of the work worth it.

Photo by Shayna Isenberg

We now have a beautiful LEGO flower bouquet centerpiece on our dining table that will always remind us of our wedding. And my bridesmaids each have a LEGO bouquet in their homes as well. A craft project that took way longer than expected, ended up looking way better than I could imagine. :-)

(P.S. all of the pictures are from guests at the wedding. the bouquets were probably one of the most photographed elements of the wedding :-) can't ask for much more)