Shake, Rattle and Roll

We went to have brunch with my bro and sis-in-law yesterday morning. Lovely to see them and Anya. She's looking more adorable every day. I took along a little gift I'd made. It is my first baby rattle that I consider good enough to give away. In short: I had a log of ash, split it, shaped it, shaved it, halved it, carved it, filled it, glued it, finished it.

As it is designed to be used by a little person, my motivation was to keep everything as inert as possible. All steps of the project were done by hand. I picked up the freshly felled log from a woodland in Surrey and did all the shaping and carving using only manual hand tools. Getting the rattle to sound right was a fun task. In my prototype, I used a combination of dry wild rice and dry red lentils. Sounded OK but needed a deeper tone. After several shake tests, I settled on a combination of dry soya bean and dry pearl barley, giving a great combination of high and low tones. The finish was a couple of coats of Chestnut Products Finishing Oil which is safe for use on toys per British Standard EN 71. I like it. It is attractive, tactile and functional:


Hopefully have time to perfect the design soon...