Design

We've finally settled on a design for the crib. It follows the style I've used in most of the furniture I've built: a mix of classic (Shaker-ish) and contemporary. I really like to mix woods, especially maple and cherry. The basic shape has a few gentle curves to it, but it's not overly swoopy and ornate (it is a boy, after all). I made the model using Google SketchUp (which is a fantastic program) and generated 2D images from it.

We've gone back and forth on the design of sides. Originally, the sides were going to be slats, just like the front and back. Recently we've been playing around with solid sides, which you can see in the pictures (the top picture shows solid on one side and slats on the other). The nice thing about solid sides is that we can add funky cut-outs: one idea is to have a moon and stars on one side, and a sun on the other. One tricky part: the cut-outs have to conform to the same guidelines for safety (i.e., no gap bigger than 2 3/8").