Soap Dish pt. 3 Suck It Up/Drop It

First I made this soap dish in stoneware clay, but with wet hands in a bathroom, it broke during one day of cleaning. Then I 3D-modeled and 3D-printed it in instead. 🙂

I use a plastic called PLA plastic. It is bio-based, made from various vegetable starches, which means it is bio-degradable. Not compostable, but under the right circumstances in an industrial composting facility it will bio-degrade.

Since this soap dish will sit in a bathroom, getting water on it every day from your dripping hands, I chose to make one iteration where I smudge beeswax and flaxseed oil mixture all over it to make it completely water-resistant. It took about two weeks for the PLA to absorb the fat and it gave the plastic a matte and a bit sticky surface. Not ideal. Now that I have tested it out for a good few months nothing has happened with the PLA. Not even the surface finish has changed one tiny bit.

The loofah sponge is a natural sponge, a sea cucumber I think they are called. It absorbed excess moisture so that your soap does not turn to mush. Water can also drip down onto the basin through the hole underneath the loofah. The soap leftovers on the loofah can either be used for body scrubbing if you have the soap dish in the shower for example, or you can use it to clean the basin itself.

Here are some pictures of my process

I forgot to add support material in the 3D-printer software. :/

Here I greased one of the soap dishes with my own mixture of beeswax and flaxseed oil.

A lot got stuck underneath the loofah sponge shelf but it does not matter.

I bought a new 3D-printing filament and made more.

I do not know what happened here. I think it had to do with how the surfaces were joined together in 3D-modeling.

Loofah sponges arrived and I cut them to size in my workshop at home.

The final results

One soap dish with tiny feet, which makes it slightly elevated.

I added small platforms to add feet so that the soap dish sits just above the basin’s surface.

Now I want to make them in a completely different material. Just for fun. 🙂