One of LEGO’s most popular small sets of the last few years has been 40460: Iconic Roses which consists of two buildable roses. Constantly out of stock and snatched up as soon as it became available, LEGO decided to give customers more of what they want by introducing a 10328: Bouquet of Roses which bumps the rose count up to 12 and includes a handful of baby’s breath too.
While great on its own I decided to try something different by recolouring 10328: Bouquet of Roses to make the famous red roses black.
Opening up the set in Studio, LEGO’s official CAD programme, and I was happy to see that every red piece in the set is available in black, making the swap easy. Kind of.
While black swap pieces are available, many of them are on the rarer side only appearing in one or two sets. This is because some of the pieces – especially some used for the large petal pieces – make use of relatively new moulds that haven’t been around long enough to be included in a variety of sets.
Because of this it’s my advice that you wait a short while for these pieces to become more widespread. That may entail waiting a few LEGO release waves or by making purchases from many Bricklink stores. Even if you live somewhere to access of hundreds of stores, such as the US or EU, it may still requiring shopping around. Because of this I am going to recommend this project only to those who are quite familiar with Bricklink and how to maximise orders on there.
Even if you’re a seasoned Bricklink buyer the pieces are very much on the pricey side right now, again owing to their rarity.
I am also going to recommend anyone hoping to replicate this project, that they buy the original set 10328: Bouquet of Roses. This is because, while we’re swapping out a decent amount of the parts in the set for the new, black ones, we still need all the pieces for the stems, leaves and baby’s breath. I did a quick check and buying these on their own would account for around 80 percent of the RRP of the original set when shopping through Bricklink, so it just makes sense to wait for a sale on the roses set, buy it, and then keep those red pieces in your collection when you swap for the black.
The pasts list for those black pieces can be found on Rebrickable along with the instructions you can follow to replicate this project. While you could follow the original instructions for the red roses, that LEGO offers on its website for free, I thought it would be easier this way so I went through the process of making new and custom instructions which use the black pieces.
LEGO split its official instructions across several books and I did the same for my instructions. This also has the side effect of making this project easy to split with another builder. While we just existed February, the month of love, I think this black recolour build is a nice project to share with someone special in your life you likes things a bit darker. While you could save that for next Valentine’s Day, keep reading for something closer to Halloween.
Making something spookier
While roses, whether red or black, are timeliness, I think this black variant project is a great decoration to roll out for Halloween.
I had this in the back of my mind so much that I decided to go one step further and adorn the baby’s breath for skulls. The minifigure head for LEGO’s skeleton can pop right onto the open studs on the baby’s breath build.
By my count you’d need 72 of these little skulls to fill up every open stud on the baby’s breath. If anyone actually wants to do this in real life I would suggest leaving some of them open. Not only will this look less cluttered, but it reduced the chance that the heads will bump into each other.
In making the render you see above you may notice that I left a pair of the skulls off for this very reason, as Studio was informing me that there were collisions in the model.
Taking this skeleton motif even further is my idea for a vase. LEGO’s range of buildable flowers is sometimes criticizes for the fact that many of them come without a way to properly display them. The original red rose bouquet is one of these sets without a buildable vase or display base in the box.
While you could use any glass vase of even a pot to display your roses, why not use another official LEGO product?
LEGO offers both a ceramic mug and a storage “box” in the shape of the skull. The mug seems to only be available in a small size while the storage head comes in both small and large.
While I’d love to recommend one or the other, both were sold out at the time of writing so I couldn’t go past my local LEGO store to see which would be the best fit.
If anyone does use any of these skulls as a vase for their roses, either red or black, please share a picture under the “Photos” section on Rebrickable, or on the Hypertext Twitter or Facebook.
Whatever way you go, just remember that you’ll likely need to fill the container with some kind of material to keep the roses from moving. Many people use their spare LEGO pieces to do this but, again for those who want to go past their local LEGO store, grab some suitable elements from the Pick a Brick wall.
