Kayleigh Yule, third-year Product Design student, describes her recent project of a dual soap dish.
Upon beginning to use soap bars to reduce my plastic waste, I realised two facts hindering my experience. Firstly, standard soap dishes are too small to accommodate multiple soap bars and secondly, student flats don’t offer much surface real estate around the bathtub to hold soap dishes.
My solution to these issues was to make a soap dish that would hold multiple soaps at one time while optimising the narrow spaces of bathtub ledges.
Using stoneware clay, I sculpted the soap dish into the organic form, before glazing and kiln firing. The peculiar thing about glaze is that you never really know how it will colour your pottery – my glaze, Blue Opal, came out as mossy green with a pooling of blue.
There is a rewarding sense in the resourcefulness of problem solving from craft. Though we live in a state of constant availability to new, trending, fast-paced products, craft or the reinvention of the once loved grants us a perspective of appreciation for the time, effort and material that participates in the making of a tangible, cherished product.
Images via Kayleigh Yule.