The flowered dome designs were extremely intricate, using multiple colors of glass and various shapes and sizes of glass.

Unlike the geometric designs where Tiffany allowed the shapes to guide his designs – the flowered domes where drawn and designed then the glass was cut to fit together like puzzle pieces.

A few of the flowered dome designs simply took a geometric design such as the Plain Squares pattern and added floral designs that circled around the bottom edge. Many of the designs were far more intricate though.

For example the infamous Daffodil and Dragonfly designs are from the Flowered Dome category.

To help explain how intricate some of these tiffany lamp shades were, we will dissect a couple of the patterns, beginning with the Tulip. This shade consists of blue, green, red and purple glass and no two pieces are cut the same.

There are approximately 20 tulips encasing this Tiffany shade, half of which are purple and the other half red. Each tulip has 3-4 petals and over 100 pieces of green glass for the leaves and stems. Lastly there are at least 50 pieces of blue sky.

The Oriental Poppy design is one of the most intricate of the Tiffany flowered domes. This shade has well over 1000 pieces of glass ranging from blues, to reds, to oranges, and to greens.

The only thing that is vaguely simple about this Tiffany design is the single row of geometric rectangles that border the bottom edge – beyond that no two pieces are cut the same and very few are even the same shade as the others.

The process that makes the Tiffany lamp possible is the Copper Foil Method of placing copper foil around every single piece of cut and cleaned glass, then soldering them all together – creating a single wire weld that encompasses the entire shade.

If it were not for this method Tiffany would have never been able to create some of these intricate designs and his famous lamps would not have lasted through the test of time.