This year, we were invited to be one of the many artists to work on An International Street Piano Project presented by The Playtent. In this social initiative, we were honored to work with some ladies from H.O.M.E. to decorate a piano for auction. It was a very humbling experience working with these ladies who left their home country to Singapore to work and are now stranded here. The theme for the piano was “Every cloud has a silver lining.” This message was to give hope to those destitute migrants and hope to the organization working so hard to give a voice and support to these migrants.
I met some of the ladies one afternoon and went through the concept and items that they could do off site. They were very efficient because within the week, they had completed sewing some felt cloud mobiles. While I visited the shelter, I noticed that they also did sewing projects to earn some money. They were very serious and meticulous in the work that they did.
The next time I met with the lovely ladies was at S.C.A.P.E. It was to paint the piano and bench. We were able to finish up the painting the piano within a couple of hours. I was really grateful to the ladies for accommodating my timing as being a stay at home mom, I was only able to take time off when the kids were napping and I managed to get help to mind the children. Unfortunately it was not appropriate to bring the kids along as one of my paints was oil based and it had a strong odor that I didn’t think was safe for the kids to be around.
While we were painting the bench, we noticed that it was rotting and we decided to upholster it. We had help from Adrian, Marlina’s husband who looked around for wood shops and managed to have the shop cut the wood to size. One evening, Marlina and Adrian went to S.C.A.P.E and pulled out the rotten portion of the bench and attached the new piece of wood. Once that was done, we reupholstered the bench with new batting and fabric. The ladies from H.O.M.E. painted the bench and decoupaged the inside of the bench with scraps of fabric that we recycled from cutting out the clouds.
We met up for the third time with the ladies and continued working on the piano: touching up of the paint, decoupaging fabric clouds to piano and using silver markers to outline the clouds. We were so proud that the ladies participated in the vast majority of the project; they were very focused and meticulous. We are very thankful to H.O.M.E. for giving us a chance to work with them and to turn and idea into reality – to decorate a piano. It’s such an honor for us to be part of this project. We also thank the people at Playtent for allowing us the opportunity to be part of this wonderful project.
Our piano was part of the 25 pianos showcased on 21 March at OCBC SQUARE and it was recently displayed at Esplanade for their Flipside event.
To read more about this global street piano movement, please click here.
xoxo
Sharon
Jelly Bean Attic 