Terrace cradle

It is common in Finland to have children take their naps outdoors. It is considered healthy even in below zero temperatures. Lots of people use the prams for this purpose, some even have two sets of prams because of this. They have usually bought a very cheap prams and use those on their balcony or terrace. We could have done the same, but I had a bit different idea.

I wanted to make a cradle from a basket and hung that on the roof beams in our conservatory. From a flea market I found an oldish shingle laundry basket, it was in ok shape, one handle was missing and the corners were bit broken but it still felt sturdy. I got some straps, I wanted to buy white straps but for some reason I was unable to find any, so I bought black ones.

I removed the odd handle from the basket and made a cover for the inside of the basket. I used black sheet fabric just because the straps I had bought were black too. We had visited Ikea earlier where we had bought a baby mattress. I removed the mattress from the cover and cut it to the size of the basket. I also resew the cover of the mattress to the new size. Next I attached the straps. I placed two straps to go under the basket. Then I placed two straps going around the basket, one on the bottom and one on top. The places where the straps overlap I sewed on the wrong side of the horizontal straps pieces of the same strap, so it makes a groove for the vertical strap to go through. This way the straps stay on place way better.

I did a bit of load testing with weights, I placed in the cradle some weights and lifted the whole thing up from the straps. It felt really rigid, I had also thought of adding a plywood piece between the basket and the straps, but this particular basket does not seem to need any extra stiffening pieces.

I had two concerns. One was that if a weight or a force as illustrated on the picture would happen to come to the side of the basket would the straps slide on the roof beam and cause the basket to flip. The other was that also the basket could slide relative to the straps, the straps might stay on place but still the force may cause the basket to flip. Also both situations could happen simultaneously.

To avoid those scenarios I needed to fix both the straps going over the roof beam to each other and the straps to the basket. But I did not want to use any permanent fixing.

For the fixing on the top I bought two buckles, I did want to get metallic ones, but I was unable to find any in the right size and settled for plastic ones. Those were black anyway so they blend in with the black straps.

For the fixing point on the basket side, I actully did not do as in the drawing above but made a few stiches on the point where the horizontal and vertical straps cross each other.

Love the cradle basket, I would like to crawl into it myself. It really pleases my eye, the old basket and the industrial straps go really well together I think. Hope the kid likes rocking.

This basket cradle neither is my own idea, I have seen this type of basket cradle in some interior design magazine years ago. I have no idea which magazine it was and how long ago was it that I saw it. I don't have the image saved anywhere, but some ideas just stick to my head even though I have no use for them at the time.

Just realized I could link this to the Op-Shop Show-Off because the basket was from thrift store.