Horoscope Soap Dish

Hi! After we went into lockdown here in the UK, I moved back in to my parents house for a few months, just as they were renovating. I bought my first power tool (a jigsaw) to help build them a ramp and, as I'm sure many of you can relate to, one tool led to another and before I knew it I was trying my hand at woodworking for the first time.

My first proper project was a mirror frame and, at the end of this, I had some left over oak (you can see in the pictures the very poor mitred corners on the plank, which were the reason this didn't make it onto the mirror). I wanted to flex my creativity a bit and with a friend's birthday coming up, I decided to make a soap dish with lid.

She's pretty interested in horoscopes, so I carved the symbol for her star sign into the lid and I drilled the drainage holes in the base of the dish in the pattern of the stars for her star sign too.

It was pretty fun, if a little rough, but I was pretty pleased with the outcome for one of my first tries at proper woodworking. It seemed to do the trick as well - the recipient is now my girlfriend!

• Hardwood plank (I used scrap S4S oak)
• Carbon transfer paper
• Gilding glue and metallic leaf (optional)
• Spray polyurethane

Tools:

• Router
• Jigsaw
• Rotary tool
• Clamps
• Drill

• First, I measured out the base of the soap dish. I knew I wanted to create a 'rim' all the way around the piece with a raised internal lip, so that the lid would sit on the base nicely. So, before hollowing out the central cavity of the dish, I used the router around the perimeter of the shape I had measured out to create that rim.
• Once this was done, I used my jigsaw to cut the piece loose from the main piece of material

(As I said, I used a messed up part of a mirror frame for this project, which meant that I was pretty limited on the final dimensions of the dish. Working with only a few tools and using a pre-prepared plank meant I couldn't really change the thickness or the width of the material - I could only decide how long I wanted the dish to be. If I were to do this again, I would love to use some wider wood, as I ended up having to slim down a nice bar of soap for it to sit in the dish snugly)

• I used a router to hollow out the cavity in both the base and lid pieces, to create the space for the bar of soap. I was using a pretty big corded router and I was quite unfamiliar with it, so I taped out the perimeter of where I wanted remove wood. This just made it easier for me to keep an eye on where my router bit was and when I was approaching the edge.
• When hollowing out the lid, I made sure that the wood I left on the sides was the same thickness as that rim I had created on the base, so that it would sit on there snugly with that raised internal lip holding the lid in place.
• You can see I was pretty new to using the router! The burn marks and uneven edges give it away. I used my rotary tool with a helix burr to tidy up the profile a bit.

• I cut the lid from the main plank so that I had my two pieces loose.
• I clamped and taped them together to test the fit and the lid sat on the base nicely! However, as you can see, the two pieces weren't quite equal in length on the external measurements. I hadn't been introduced to power sanders yet, so an awful lot of hand-sanding end grain followed to even up the two halves.

• I knew the soap dish was going to be getting wet pretty often, and soap dishes I had seen around the house raised the bar of soap up so that it wasn't sat in a puddle of water that had pooled in the base. I routed out a central channel on the bottom side of the base, so that the two strips on either side acted as feet and raised the dish enough to let water flow away.
• I drilled holes through the base to give the water a way to drain. I knew I was going to be basing the lid design on the recipients star sign, so I saw an opportunity to continue the theme here and drilled the holes in the pattern of the constellation associated with that star sign. Each hole represents a star in the constellation and I used the rotary tool to carve channels between the holes, to replicate the lines that join the stars in diagrams.

(This is probably the first time you can clearly see that rim with raised internal lip I was talking about on the base)

• I printed the horoscope sign onto some regular paper and taped this onto the lid, on top of a layer of carbon transfer paper.
• I traced on the printed design, which presses the transfer paper below and leaves a layer of graphite on the wood. I used a ballpoint pen to trace the design, both so that I could apply enough pressure to transfer the graphite and so that I could keep track of where on the design I had already drawn.

• Once the design was on the wood, I simply used a ball-shaped burr on my rotary tool to channel out the design on the lid. Here you can see the lid and base with all the major woodworking processes finished.

• In order to make the design really pop, I used some faux silver leaf.
• I applied gilding glue into the design on the lid and the channels in the base. The glue dries to a tacky consistency which grabs on to the foil and holds it there - but you have to be very accurate with the glue as the foil really will stick to any tiny bit of glue on the wood!
• Once the glue has dried tacky, I laid a sheet of silver leaf across the top and used the rounded end of a paintbrush to press the foil into all the little crevices.
• Then, I simply had to brush over the foil with a stiff bristled brush, which tears away all of the excess foil and only leaves behind that which touched the glue.

• To help protect the wood (and the silver leaf) from the constant water and soap, I applied several generous coats of spray on polyurethane, which really helped the grain of the oak stand out and left a smooth, shiny (and waterproof) surface all over the soap dish. Once this had dried, my first personal woodworking design was finished!