Melody's School Outfit
The shirt is t-shirt knit, similar in feeling to the shirt in Logan's Performance Outfit or the AGP Store Exclusive tees. Velcro up the back.
The stockings are bright red and are closer to a colour match with the shirt than they appear in photos --- though there is a slight difference to the orange side. They look like normal AG stockings, but they must be a little delicate. Every display doll (and they were only put out within the last two days) had completely picked areas on the back of the stocking legs.
The shoes are a shiny vinyl to look like patent leather. They just slip onto the doll's foot. I really liked the look and design of these, but it was quite disappointing to see how thin and flimsy the vinyl was. These shoes are not the quality that I was expecting and aren't close to the old Mary-Jane shoes from Samantha's Shoes and Socks set. From afar, these look cute . . . but on close inspection, they look rather cheap.
The hair ribbons are two pieces of satin ribbon to tie onto Melody's braids.
It's a cute outfit, and the pieces are nice. But this is a quality that should be more in the $28-32 range.
Melody's Upright Piano
The keys and fancy carving decorations on the front of the piano are plastic -- as is the under side of the keyboard, as that is the battery compartment.
The seat of the bench lifts up and reveals a small compartment for sheet music. It looks like the upholstery on the seat cushion is just glued on under a small piece of pressed wood, so I think it would be easy to recover with a quality fabric. The fabric on the seat is pretty awful -- but that is something you can fix.
The plastic decoration on the front of the piano kind of spoils the look of the faux-wood finish, but there isn't too much of it. The keys each press individually and play a different note. The sound of the notes is operated through a battery-powered speaker that is on the underside of the keyboard (there's a picture in the slideshow).
The following is a quick video that I took of the sound when you press the keys on the piano. I aimed the camera at the little speaker under the keyboard. Sorry about the store noise in the background, but I think you can hear the notes anyway!
In case the embedded video doesn't work for some reason, here's the link to it on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/wvEDKfW-XII
More pictures and thoughts on new pieces coming soon!