When I was happy with the final part of the main cylinder I created a sphere and placed it on top of the two, slightly squat spheres above the cylinder, removing the bottom few tiers of faces so that I could connect the sphere to the rest of the metal part.Having created the main part of the base, I then moved on to making the cradle for the actual telephone.

      I started this wrong, however, as I tried to insert a cylinder into the side of a sphere, and then attach it to another cylinder which I would use as the cradle arms. As you can see, the geometry doesn't work at all, and in the end, I had to completely remove the top sphere and remake that portion of the model using floating geometry, which works much easier as there are no errors in the geometry by the time the rendering phase comes.