What was the inspiration?
Some while back I visited Mirek and Leah at Puppets in Prague and I noticed this piece showing two parents and their baby. As you rock the cradle, the baby rolls contentedly from mum to dad to mum to dad… You could take another view and interpret it as the stressed parents shoving the responsibility for the squalling babe to and fro. Whichever way you look at it, I thought that it was a really interesting piece and that I should have a go myself. Mirek had no complaints when I suggested that, but my version has moved quite some way away from the simple elegance of his cradle.
What Interests a Baby?
Well apart from its parents, I came up with a short list including a milk bottle, a dummy (aka pacifier on the other side of the Atlantic), a potty and a soft toy. This gave me 4 options to play with, so I went for a carousel instead of a two-ended cradle. At first I thought that the babies could wear nappies, but then I realised that no self-respecting baby sits on a potty whilst wearing a nappy, so I put them all in their birthday suits instead.
Pinwheels
When someone turns the crank with its red handle, a 10-pin gearwheel turns and engages with a 30-pin gearwheel attached to the main driveshaft, painted with a spiral blue pattern. I used my favourite online wood gear generator (https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html) with a pin spacing of 12 mm to print out paper patterns for the pinwheels. My pins are made of 3 mm dowel. Precision is very important here as the slightest pin-positioning error causes a grumbling noise as the pins engage with one another. My pinwheels usually grumble…
The Track
With some MDF (medium density fibreboard) I first cut a 20 mm thick ring shape for the carriage wheels to roll along. I pencilled a cutting line around the side with three peaks and troughs, to lift the carriages up and down. As MDF has no grain it’s fairly easy to cut a smooth curve. To avoid wear marks from the wheels, I didn’t paint it.
The Carriage Driver
The shaft which is driven by the large pinwheel turns a “cross”. This cross has four stubby protrusions which each hinge an arm with a wheel. Each wheel runs along the track. I found the wheels (with ball bearings) in a dusty drawer somewhere. I must have bought them from a craft shop some time ago.
The hinges use small pieces of brass rod which move freely in holes drilled in the central “cross”.
Each “carriage is mounted on to a small block at the end of its arm.
The four “carriages” are still without any passengers here.
The Passengers
I was unsure what posture the babies would take on their very individualistic carriages, so I decided to leave the decision as late as possible in the assembly process
A wooden ball serves as a head and an egg as the body. A very primitive hinge allows me to tip the head this way and that until I was happy with the pose and a dollop of glue fixes it for all eternity.
I carved arms and legs as separate entities. Only when I could see how each baby can sit on their carriage did I fetch the glue out.
The babies on the milk bottle and the bear can sit astride, as if riding a horse. The baby on the dummy wraps its legs around the teat and hangs on to it for dear life. The last baby, on the potty, has half fallen in to the opening and is looking down in amazement, presumably at what it has just produced?
The Last Touch
The mechanism in the centre is of course a hazard for small fingers so I made a symbolic mum from a large wooden hemisphere to cover everything up, well almost everything.
On Reflection
There is not actually very much going on here. The main performers sit very still on their carriages. It’s a frozen tableau which just goes round and round and gently up and down. I suppose that a brand new observer will take a while to sort out what all of the various elements represent and recognition may result in a soft smile. The potty may be hard to recognise as it looks more like an antique chamber pot, so I added a reminder of what it might contain by painting it yellow. Whatever else, I will be quite content with a soft smile.
Video
Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0h0uePFiyY
Images
Download ZIP package from https://www.wordwise.de/Baby_archive.zip