OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

274875 Thomas Conroy 2021‑12‑05 Re: Wooden Soap Dish?
John Leyden wrote:
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Darling Daughter has requested that a wooden soap dish be found in her stocking
this holiday season.

My gut reaction is…yuck!

Regardless of wood species used, I can’t imagine something more easily inclined
to slime and rot.

Please correct me if I am wrong. I’ll do anything for this young lady as
doubtless you would for one of your own. But wood in the tub?...

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Hi, John,
For what its worth:
About forty years ago I inherited, from the widow of a greatuncle who died in
1959, an unopened cake of shaving soap packaged in a small turned wooden
(maple?) bowl with a lid. This wasn't a fancy gift presentation; it was clearly
meant to be a working shaving tool (won't shatter into feet-slicing bits of
ceramic, the way a conventional mug will if you drop it on a tile floor on a
groggy morning). I never had a use for shaving soap, but eventually I finished
the bowl with spar varnish and used it occasionally for flour paste. I never had
an issue with slime or rot, beyond what I would have had anyway in a ceramic or
plastic paste pot.
My binding teacher has used wooden bowls for paste for as long as I can
remember, say forty years. The paste is changed and the bowls washed out every
week; there is no sign of rot or bacteria, beyond what you have anyway from the
paste itself. Traditional English paste pots were shallow coopered wood bowls.
Coopered wooden vessels were traditionally used in many houshold functions into
the twentieth century.
Any soap bowl is going to have a slime problem, but from melted soap, not from
bacteria. Between the anti-bacterial properties of wood, the anti-bacterial
properties of soap, and occasional cleaning, I don't see that "slime and rot"
should be anything to worry about unduly. I would suggest making the soap dish
by turning, to reduce potential gaps and cracks where nasty stuff might settle
in; but that is more a matter of your own skills, tooling, and tastes.
Tom ConroyBerkeley

Recent Bios FAQ