Piano Shelf and Hammer Bird

Recently, my mother took apart an old piano that my family had gotten after a relative passed away many years ago. We'd kept it in our house for several years, and I had played on it a little, but it was always out of tune and mom wasn't keen on keeping the entire piano downstairs in the basement. Though it's a little sad to see the piano no longer functioning as a musical instrument, I think what she did with the parts with pretty cool and keeps the sentimentality of something that otherwise wasn't really being used:

My dad and mom secured the keys with a board on the back after removing the keyboard from the piano. They used the door from the top of the upright piano (which can be moved to help cover the keys or to place the sheet music on) to hold sheet music and pictures of my grandparents on their wedding day and my mother as a child. The piano belonged to a relative of my grandfather. I like how you can still read the brand, Melville Clark, on the bottom part. The keyboard holds more family pictures and jars with dried roses and piano hammers.

The bench from the piano hold more items: sheet music that belonged to my grandmother, more family photos, and the pedals of the piano. Pretty much all the important parts are still there. I think it looks beautiful. I don't know if I could take apart a well-functioning piano, but if I could buy a rough or badly out of tune one at an auction, I'd love to recreate this shelf/art someday.

So, that's the background of this post, which will now take a different but related path. I don't have a piano to make a shelf like that out of. But, mom gave me some of the hammers from the piano to use for crafts. I may put some in jars like she did, or a shadowbox, but I wanted to look online for some other neat ideas too. Between pinterest and google, I found lots of neat ideas. Here's one:

http://velvetdavinci.com/allimages.php?action=allartists&mode=1&id=&page=77 This is an art site ... not a DIY site. So, I'm copying a little bit ... but it's a pretty simple design and I have hammers of my own to use. I think it's fair.

I decided to take a chance with the cute hammer-tail bird. If you haven't learned already from some of my other DIY posts, I'm a little impatient and sometimes forget that I should take pictures throughout the process if I am going to blog about it later. So, there are some steps that go pretty fast. But I will work on being better about that in the future.

I only have two big-ended hammers and want to save them for something special, so I decided to use one of the three skinny-end hammers I had for the bird. I also have other hammers with blocky ends that couldn't be used for a bird. Probably will use those in a jar or shadowbox.

Here I'm getting ready to cut the rod that separates what will become the body and tail of the bird. Cut it as smooth as you can from each piece then sand a little on each cut area.

Disassembled hammer.

Oops. Like I said, I got excited and skipped a bit. In the art-bird, the artist used some metal to decorate the wing and to create the head. I didn't have anything else I could think of to use except fabric. I had some vintage fabric from my grandmother and used that. I basically decided to "wing" the wing - ha ha - hot-gluing and wrapping the fabric around the end and cutting off extra as I went. This decorated the wing but also covered the spot where I cut off the rod, which was otherwise visible. Then I hot-glued the wing at an angle onto one side of the body.

Here is his head closer up. This was trial-and-error with some fabric and aluminum foil until I got sort of a template. Basically it is just folded over to make a head shape and glued to the top corner of the body. I would like to add something for a beak later like the original, but am not sure what to add yet. I added a button eye and sequin iris which is in the next picture.

Finished birdy! I glued the eye on the spot where there was sort of a semi-circle cut-out on the bird body (covered in the previous pictures by fabric, but visible early on). Then I glued a little sequin to be the iris/pupil. Here he is with my blue Christmas-y bird, his new buddy. It was a feat getting him to stand on his own. He's rear end heavy, as you can imagine. I'll have to find something small but dense to glue to the bottom of his foot for balance.

I feel like I'm becoming as bird-obsessed as my friend over at http://lovinghere.com/. She has a big, fat, white bird on her mantle that I love and a bird-themed poster in her bedroom .... I've got Christmas-y bird,  a fat little blue bird in our bedroom, and now Mr. Hammer Bird. Good thing they are pretty quiet little birds or else Llyr would probably be trying to eat them up. He already touch-touch-touches all over the blue bird in our room whenever he gets up where he shouldn't.