My girlfriend became my wife, and we are expecting a baby. This inspired me to create a bed or a cradle for the new family member. After checking some articles we chose the cradle. Because the continuous movement provided by a cradle stimulates the baby's nervous system and it is developing better, than in a simple bed.
There are basically two types of cradles, one is the rolling (classic) cradle, which is rolling on its foot, and the hanging one which is hanged up by ropes. The first one is able to move into only one direction while the latter can move into more . We decided to choose the hanging one.
After drawing some plans I was a bit scared, because until that time, this was my biggest project on my woodworking way. I also needed to get some new tools to create long flat surface or convex arcs.
First I made the scaffold, which is basically two legs connected with two beams - one at the top and a smaller one on the bottom. The base of the legs are rounded and a column is glued into them. The beams are fixed with chocks. The parts of the scaffold can be seen in the following picture:
Next step was the basket part of the cradle, exactly its sides. The sides were a grid with lot of small items, it took a while until I cut and shaped to join exactly these items. The top bars had a small arch. The components of this grid can be seen in this picture:
When the sides were assembled, I needed to cut and join the bottom sticks, it also needed some chiselling to fit them correctly. When it was ready only the face and the back sides were left. These sides were arched in the same angle as the leg of the scaffold. The items of theese steps are on this picture:
When it was done and all the components were ready, without assembling they look liked this:
When everything was done It just needed to be hanged on with a rope and insert the mattress. (Unfortunately it was placed in our small room, so I did not have a chance to get a good viewpoint for the pictures):
And from top view:
