Not Toast, Just Avocado

I was finally running low on dish soap recently, and I came upon the usual dilemma: to purchase a new one-time-use package of dish soap cost a certain amount, and with nearly that same amount I could instead buy a refill of 2-4x the size.

What a quandary.

So I decided to do the eco-friendly thing and buy a permanent dispenser and a bulk pack of soap, because why not.

The dispenser arrived yesterday, and it came with a little laser cut plywood hang-tag, looped to the neck of the bottle with a bit of twine string. Quaint and amusing. It was of course unlettered, as the end user was intended to write on it the description of the dispenser's contents. So naturally I popped the top off of one of my sharpie paint pens and...

Well, that could have gone better. I suppose I should have expected the dyes to run when painted directly onto the unfinished plywood, but foresight was not on my side that day.

But when life gives you a droplet-shaped lemon, make avocados... or something like that.

A few coats of titanium white mostly blotted out the sins soaked into the wood fibers, and some playful yellow-greens and browns gave it the appearance of an avocado.

Unfortunately, the unbridled power of titanium white was not quite sufficient to prevent one of the dyes from the paint marker from leeching up through the paint layers and leaving a little ghost of the past showing. Undeterred, I decided that I still wanted the dispenser to advertise that it contained dish soap, and not some sort of strange orange avocado extract, so I redid my lettering on top of the paint and acrylic varnish once it had all dried.

Much less bleeding this time. Delightful.

I'll go ahead and toot my own horn and say that I think this tag came out looking quite nice.