After some sort of silence, I grabbed a new, slightly ambitious, project: I decided to build a piano. I have never made anything as big and laborious before, but one has to challenge oneself, right.
As always, this project naturally started with a plan. I didn’t list all the parts in the beginning as I pondered where I might need more support or depth throughout the project. I measured the required height (7cm) by measuring the distance from the floor to my adult doll’s elbow or chest. Rest of the measurements I estimated based on pictures online and our own piano. As can be seen in the picture, I also took out all the materials I needed. I only used wood in this project. Basically an eco piano isn’t it?
The next step was to cut, or saw (I am super thankful for my mitre saw!) all the pieces. I edited all the measurements I could to the picture so that anyone who wants can do the same sized piano. The scale is 1:18 and suitable for Lundby dollhouses. The piece marked with a star (*) was 0.5cm wide when I took the picture but I had to make it thinner later. 0.3cm is the actual final width. Every piece in the lower right is 9.7cm wide and the posts are 4.5cm long. The only pieces missing are the pedals and the top panel of the piano. At this point I hadn’t even thought about pedals yet. I made those at the very end. The top panel I cut only after I had built the entire piano to make sure it fit perfectly. It ended up being 0.9x10cm. I painted the pieces before putting the piano together to avoid blank spots in the finished item. The piano has a lot of difficult angles in terms of painting so blank spots could have been possible.
Then I had to put the whole thing together. The first thing I made was the keyboard piece. I made 1.5mm wide keys (the white ones) by cutting lines to a popsicle stick. The keys aren’t actually separate pieces but simply a stick with slits. First, I painted the entire piece black to make the slits visible and then I painted every individual key white one by one. For the black keys I simply cut tiny rectangular pieces, painted them black and glued them on. There are 52 white and 36 black keys. Working with those took a whole day. The piano itself I managed to wrap up in one day. Wherever I saw a gap between glued parts or a crevice in the wood I filled them with wood putty, sanded and painted with black on top. Even though going back and forth was a bit frustrating, the piano looks so much cleaner without all those gaps. I also found out that the putty I bought two years back is still usable after adding a drop of water :). The final step was making the pedals. They come about 1cm out of the piano. I first drew the shape onto a 0.6cm wide craft stick and sanded it out. Then I simply glued them on and painted golden. I finished up the piano with two layers of gloss varnish and that’s it. Mini world’s very own piano.
As you can see from the pictures, the piano has no brand name yet. Please submit your own suggestion via the form on this page or by commenting on the post on Instagram on my account @pikkuihanuuksia.
And as I have started to do, here are the materials:
2.5cm x 20cm jumbo popsicle stick (4kpl)
0.6cm x 19cm craft stick (2kpl)
0.9cm x 11,4cm popsicle stick (4kpl)
10cm long round stick, diameter 4mm (1kpl)
Thin (thickness c.3mm) wood panel, for example plywood
Black, white and golden acrylic paint
Shiny varnish (I used Fimo gloss varnish)
Wood or hobby glue
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