Walnut Trestle Cradle

This is my first project posting on Lumberjocks. My wife and I are expecting our first baby in early September. I saw a similar cradle to this on the FWW website at about the same time we found out. I decided that I wanted to build one. It was built mostly by hand. All the stock preparation and joinery was done by hand. I had to use a jigsaw to cut the curves on the sides and I used my table saw a few times to make a few rip cuts.

I made the swinging cradle part first and when I purchased the lumber they were having a sale on 4/4 “rustic” walnut. It was about 1/4 the price of the nicer stuff so I jumped at the deal. I now wish I had sprung for the nicer stuff. The cheaper lumber had all kind of tricky knots and difficult grain which made it very difficult to work with hand planes. Lesson learned. The Trestle base was much easier to build in comparison. I finished it with about 4 coats of wipe-on poly.

My biggest victory was actually getting this project done weeks in advance. My wife was impressed and now I only have about 100 other projects left to finish before the baby comes.

Thanks.