By choice, it was built using only basic bricks from 3 blue tubs and 4 purple buckets. Since I was traveling from Florida to my parents in South Carolina this became a firm limit. (Okay, it was also a limit because that is how many tubs and buckets I had.) In order to insure that there were enough red and black bricks to cover the exterior of the urn, the inside uses bricks of other colors.

Before beginning contruction, I took inspiration from the template profiling Lincoln shown on page 44 of "The Ultimate LEGO Book" and built a template of my urn through its center. This established the various diameter circles that would be used in each course. A compass and graph paper were used to determined the stud shape for each diameter circle. From the circle information I built a circle template on a large green baseplate showing each diameter circle. During construction the urn could be placed on this template as needed to verify accuracy.

With the outside diameters graphed, I placed a circle 4 studs smaller inside each diameter circle to aid construction planning. The resulting doughnut shape was symetrically populated such that it interlocked well when turned 90 degrees to itself and to the next larger and smaller circles. In the transition zone between the Greek Keys and the neck it was required to interlock with circles 2 sizes distant, thus necessitating the thicker wall.

The urn is actually in 3 sections, the middle section consisting of the widest diameter portion with the Greek Key design. The other sections are, of course, above and below the center one. The 3 section construction facilitated reworks that were needed to stretch the supply of red and black bricks as the project neared completion. In the end I decided not to fit them tightly together in order to preserve this feature should I decide to enhance the center section with more patterns. In the full size version of this image you can see some blue bricks peeking through the loose fitted sections. The top and bottom sections have alignment bricks attached to aid mating them with the middle section.

I spent a couple hours a day for about a week working on it. A couple days before Christmas it was finished and I set it on my mothers' piano where it stayed for the remainder of the holidays. At the end of my vacation I turned the top section upside down into the rest and placed the whole thing in a paper bag for the car trip back to Florida. I took it to work the first day back and set it on top of my bookshelves.