Cradles for childbirth

Revell-Fan · Feb 1, 2021

My colleague (the Star Wars fan) became a father of twins last week. Everyone is fine and the little family is back home by now. To celebrate this auspicious occasion my mom and I have decided to build two cradles for them, one for each boy. The pattern came from an old magazine and was hand-drawn, that meant a lot of trial and error manufacturing the parts. Fortunately there was enough wiggle room because the parts are mainly laminated to each other.

These are the parts. All of them were laminated to another layer of paper to increase stability. Several parts need to be cut out several times. The heart cutouts were extremely misshapen so that we had to make new ones which looked better. They are not symmetrical but look way better than on the pattern sheet.

We build several little ribbons with a fork. The technique can be see here:

Some gold paper was cut to two ribbons.

The main parts were laminated on top of each other to produce two fronts and two back sides which looked like in the picture above.

One front and one back side were connected with a triangular trapezoid which was narrower on top than on the bottom.

This shape too was mainly guesstimated. The bottom was a bit longer so that it could be curved.

A flap on one side was punched through to accomodate a ribbon which would later allow the bottom to be opened and closed. The small ribbons were attached.

We got two rompers for the kids which we put inside the finished cradles. The box was a leftover piece of some parcel which was laminated with wrapping paper. And if you look carefully you can already see a little fellow which was a leftover from a previous project..!

Revell-Fan · Feb 1, 2021

Yep, it is the little hedgehog from Canon that came with the hedgehog in the chimney papercraft which I modified for my other colleague. However, since it was supposed to sit inside a chimney it did not have a belly and no hindlegs. Hmm. My mom wanted me to close the open belly and to add some legs. I told her, let's try something different. Let's put some cotton inside.

Now that was an ingenious idea because after stuffing the paper animal it suddenly looked like a real hedgehog with his soft belly.

We decided to leave him this way. Now it looks as if he is sitting on his bum, looking up. No need for further mods.

I printed out some tags to make clear that each of the cradles belonged to one of the boys. At first we wanted to write the full names on them but we quickly found out that space was an issue. So we only took the first letter.