What To Do With an Old Doll Cradle

Just after we moved to Northwest Georgia, I came across a handmade doll cradle at a garage sale.  At the time, I had intended to sand it down, paint it white and do a tole painting of a teddy bear on the ends.   The plan was to use the cradle to display my childhood teddy bear and two of my old dolls.

Well… that was the plan.  But now that our children have all left home, Dave and I are thinking that with our next move, we might downsize to a smaller house and I’m looking around at the things we’ve accumulated over the years and deciding what must stay and what things we really wouldn’t have room for with less square footage.  I decided that the cradle (which I never got around to painting or displaying) was one of the things that could go.

So Dave sanded it down, put a few coats of polyurethane on it and glued some felt in the bottom.

Then I got busy and made a mattress, pillow and doll quilt for it from the flannel leftover from the baby/toddler quilt I made for Dave’s granddaughter.

Dave’s grandchildren live thousands of miles away.  Shipping the cradle would have been prohibitively expensive so instead we listed it on freecycle earlier this week.  After it was picked up, I got an e-mail from the young woman we gave it to.  The e-mail said that her little girl was so excited she couldn’t wait for her to get the cradle out of the car and had been playing with it ever since.

Now that’s a much better use for that doll cradle than sitting in our living room filled with my old toys!

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