Hello again, friends of the brick! I'm making this post belatedly a little after Valentine's day, so hopefully it will still resonate with anyone who likes flowers and bricks. Lego introduced their floral sets back in 2021 and I guess soon after the alternate brick brands followed suit, seeing that there was a market for these sets.
I checked brick4.com and there are several chinese building block brands making floral bouquets including Sembo, Panlos, Zhegao and Woma to name a few. The set I'm going to review today is the artificial plants Flower Bouquet set 20109 from JMBricklayer's Botanical Collection or Home Decor line.
At the time of this post, JMBricklayer has a total of seven different flower bouquet sets on their website. And because it's February, they are having a promotion in their online store and in their Amazon store, right now! Please check it out if this interests you.
Use my discount code "itsnotlego15%" to save on applicable purchases from the website.
Thank you again to
JMBricklayer for sending me this floral bouquet set to review! They thought it would be nice for everyone to see some flower building block sets during this special valentine season. Let's now look at the set details
Details
- Brand: JMBricklayer
- Set: Flower Bouquet 20109
- Theme: Botanical Collection/Home Decor
- Piece count: 836 pieces
- Numbered bags? Yes
- Stickers or printed parts? None
- Missing or deformed pieces: No
- Extra parts: Yes
- Minifigures: No
- Lighting kit: No
- Brick Quality and Clutch: Mostly decent
- Measurements (approx): tallest flower is about 18" H, width varies
- Age Rating: 14+
Unboxing
The Flower Bouquet set comes in a black box with the very nice image of the flower bouquet on the front. Inside there are a total of 15 bags of parts, six bags numbered 1, and eight bags with the number 2 on them. There's a last bag of pink parts all attached to sprues.
The instruction booklet contains 26 pages and is broken down into two sections which the bags of parts pertain to. A note about the number on the instruction manual. It says 034004 which when I checked brick4.com is actually a set from the Mork brand, so like many other sets from JMBricklayer, the floral set is a repackaged version.
While there are no stickers in this set, there is a warning card included on how to reduce the stem height so that the flowers don't fall over. The instructions are straightforward and easy to follow.
Building the Flowers
So in section 1, each bag pertains to a different flower, so we have built six different flowers pictured above. Hope you can name them, because I don't know much about flower species. As part of this section of the build, it also includes two different leaves.
I've never had much success with keeping plants alive, so these flowers will never need watering or any attention but will still look great wherever you put them. Since I didn't have a vase at home, I used an old peanut butter jar and this silver can as my vase.
I would highly recommend that you get a vase for this set, because it doesn't come with one. Make sure the vase is tall enough, maybe at least 12" high or more because the next flowers that we build have longer stems.
For section 2, you build four unique flowers, but some are duplicated and some are just leaves.
In section 2, you get 1 big light green flower, 2 purple flowers, a plant that has lots of little pink flowers and one that looks like a weed, lol. You also make some leaves here as well. I forgot to take a picture of me using all those tiny pink flowers from sprues to make the plant shown on the left, but you get the idea.
This series of flowers are assembled with extra technic pins that makes the stem of each flower taller. However, due to my small "vase", a lot of the flowers toppled over, so I had to reduce the stem height as per the included warning card. If I had a taller vase, I probably wouldn't have to have done that.
A problem with the purple flowers
When I followed the instructions to build the purple flowers, the heads kept falling off the stem. It was because the green pin was too short to hold the head in place.
There are two longer yellow pins included in the set, but they don't tell you what they are for. If you replace the shorter green pins with the longer yellow pins, the purple flower heads stay firmly attached. I'm not sure if this fix was included in the original Mork set, or whether this is a new fix specific to the JMBricklayer set.
I had a similar experience when building the
JMBricklayer Vintage Car set. The original Mould King branded set had some unplated pieces which were subsequently replaced in the newer JMBricklayer version of the set.
Finally, here are the extra pieces I had left over. I might have leftover some pieces on the leave portions because they were already too tall. And I didn't add all of the stem portions (technic pins) for the same reason.
Pictured here and below are my rather pathetic attempts at flower arrangement.
Hopefully you can make your flower arrangements nicer looking than mine.
Summary
So this was my first time building a floral set and I think it turned out rather nice despite being a novice at it. I think everyone, especially those new to Lego and building blocks could give this a go in case they are intimidated by the larger building block sets. Instructions were clear and easy to follow, except that they didn't mention the fact that the purple flower heads needed the longer yellow pins.
Most the flower parts held up well, but some were a little floppy. This was more of a design issue than a clutch issue. Surprisingly, I didn't have many pieces falling off despite me moving and placing them several times to take pictures.
My biggest recommendation would be to use a real vase, not an old peanut butter jar to display these flowers. And make sure it's at least 12" or more in height. I measured some of the flowers and leaves and they can be well over 18" tall if you included all the stem pieces.
From a brick perspective, I liked that the set used a lot of ingenious pieces, like snowboards, gears and scuba diving fins to make the flower petals and leaves.
Would definitely recommend this set to those with an interest in dabbling with Lego style bricks for their first time or enthusiasts who love plants and flowers. With 836 pieces, the set is sufficiently challenging and would make a nice rainy day build.
I give it 4.5 out of 5 for decent clutch, ingenuity in parts and the bright colour palette. Hope you liked this review, see you next time! Bye!
