Sing us a Song, You're the Piano man

Our youngest son Ben plays the piano and sings, often his own songs, but also covers of other people, and one of his favourites is Billy Joel's "Sing us a Song, You're the Piano Man", so when I saw a lovely 3D piano inside an exploding box, featured in Pixie's Snippets Playground several week ago, I just knew I had to make it for Ben. The original, was made by Alice for her young niece, and you can see it here. This was my inspiration, but I think I managed to put my own stamp on it. I bought the template from Card Carousel. It arrived in PDF format so the first thing I did was to change it into a svg so I could cut it with my Silhouette cameo, giving a much more accurate cut-out to work with.

I assembled the piano and left it over-night to dry completely. Then I added embellishments and filled the empty top with small flowers, some of which I made, but most were purchased ones from my stash. They needed a lot of glue to stay in place, but once it was all dry, it felt quite robust.

Then I turned my attention to the box. It went together well, and I had already got it in my mind how it would be decorated. I cut and assembled it from sturdy blue card and then added a white panel to each inner side, which had been embossed with a music folder and lightly rubbed with Memento Paris Dusk ink.

I have a selection of musical sayings and images in my silhouette library, either saved when I have seen them somewhere on the net, or purchased from the silhouette store, and I used four of these as embellishments on the inside of the box. I cut them from navy vinyl and used transfer tape to place them on the embossed panels. These are the four designs I used. And below is the box when it is open.

For the outside of the box I used panels of printed backing paper and another musical image, the same one on all four sides.

The lid was made with the same paper and image but I used a larger image with a lighter shade of blue vinyl, and added a punched lace trim around the edge. (Marianne punch).

I was only able to make this for Ben because I knew I would be travelling to UK in January and could hand deliver it. I wrapped it in bubble wrap and placed it in a large ice-cream tub in my luggage, and miraculously it arrive undamaged.

It was his birthday on Monday of this week, and he kept it until then to unwrap, and I am happy to say he loved it. So much so that he posted a video on Facebook, of how it opens to reveal the piano, and it has received lots of nice comments, so it was worth all the work.