3rd Online Display – Peter the Red

Name: Peter the Red

Location: Canton of the Towers, Barony of Carolongia

Wiki: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Peter_the_Red

Missing the SCA events and friends during this pandemic, I thought it would be good to give a gift to friends that were having babies.  I had the idea that a rocking cradle would be a great idea.  I did the best research I could do with my reading disability, and searched for medieval baby cradles, and looked and saved a bunch of pictures, and asked friends for feedback.  The rocking cradles would be good but would depend on a nice even ground, so a swinging design was chosen.  The picture said it was from the 15th Century, and it looked like a good design, so I reverse engineered it, and cut out the pieces. The carved details are references to the parents’ heraldic devices.

Assembling the pieces was going to be a challenge, so I asked my friend David for some help shaving the bottom piece to fit.  It would have been done with a plane, but we used modern equipment.  The glue and peg assembly was chosen, but we cheated again, and used modern screws and faked the pegs by recessing the screws and gluing a peg made from a broken arrow on top of it.  The swinging pivot was going to be tricky, so I borrowed a 1/2″ tap and die set thinking it would be able to be disassembled.  I later changed my approach to be a more modern metal hanger bolt, so it would not break and hurt a baby. 

I used a walnut stain to match the picture and could have used boiled linseed oil, or shellac.  I ended up using polyurethane primer and 2 coats of polyurethane (because I already had it, and I knew it would look nice).  If I was going to do it again, I would make it smaller, so that it would fit more easily in the back of a car, and would permit the baby to fit in the car too.

Additional Pictures: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=peter.carmichael1&set=a.10219753453377882