Making a Kirby-Themed Ukulele Hanger for My Niece

My 9 year old niece, Nola, has a ukulele that sadly cannot levitate and is - as such - lying on her floor. And because parents are raising her with the appropriate dose of 90s nostalgia, she also loves the Nintendo character Kirby.

Enter Uncle Sean 🙂

With this project I wanted to try out these new skills:

Modeling organic forms
Using Fusion’s canvases to design for real-world objects
Designing something to work with and hide screws
Printing something in more than one color

For this I tried Blender (again) among a few other things. After some searching, I discovered Forms in Fusion— something closer to modeling with polygons in Blender but inside Fusion. This proved to be the right approach for my skill level and the scope of this project… though I wonder if future-me would solve this problem differently.

Early test print. Don’t worry, Kriby’s getting all the oxygen he needs, this is just what I had on the printer at the time.

I ended up printing the eyes in 2 parts, white and black, then fusing them together. The blue in the eye is actually just a small bit of construction paper. Use what you have!

Eyes that snap into Kirby's head to cover the screws. Apologies for the gross closeup of my fingernails.

Making the eyes as separate parts cut out what would have been a ton of printer poop, but it also allowed me to hide the screw holes behind them. They are friction fits and pop right off.

Here's the final product before I shipped it off to my niece.

Final shot of the Kirby hanger. The colorful blanket in the background was made by my mom. We're all makers in this family :)

I had originally intended to print the feet in red filament, but in an effort to simplify things I ended up painting them instead… this was fine because I had been wanting to test painting PLA anyway. Bonus knowledge upgrade!

Here's Kirby all masked up with Frog tape for the paint

For a minute I thought I might be biting off more than I could chew with this one but after printing a stock ukulele hanger from Maker World as a fallback (to take some pressure off me to deliver) I pushed through it and was able to surprise my niece. Much like my previous project, custom storage for my YouTube gadgets, the goal here isn't perfection, it's growth.

Even with the tape there was an unfortunate amount of bleed due to the layer lines. Next time I'll have to go through more post-processing before painting. Live and learn.

God help me if my nephew decides he wants to hang a piano on the wall in Mario’s arms...