The Day I Found Soapmaking

On its surface, making soap is a really weird sort of thing to decide to start doing. I certainly wasn't putting it down on my "what I want to be when I grow up" worksheets when I was in school. I have actually changed professions quite a bit in my time (I've been a newspaper reporter, worked in human resources, lifeguarding and swim instructor through high school and college - the list goes on!). 

Audrey and her little sister Daphne, April 2013.

In 2008, my husband and I welcomed our first child into our family: Audrey! One day, after giving my new little baby a bath, I noticed that she was developing flaky, dry patches on her skin. I had had similar patches on my legs for most of my adult life. My husband, a family practice doctor, had said that there wasn't much to be done about it beyond the prescription creams I'd tried up to that point. It's funny how you'll let things like that go about yourself but when it happens to your kids, you MUST fix it immediately!

It was around this time that I dug a little deeper into the products I was using on my baby's skin that an (ahem) popular baby wash manufacturer - the very one we'd been using - disclosed that they did in fact put formaldehyde in their products. How was this possible? This came from a formaldehyde-releasing preservative (Quaternium-15) used in all of their products. 

At this point in time, my family and I lived in Indianapolis, where we had stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's to shop in. A new Kroger has sprung up and offered an expanded selection of their "Nature's Market" section. This was in the early days of our crunchy/granola revolution (where as a family, we prioritized certified organic foods, breastfeeding, making our own household cleaners, and the like). You know where this is heading: along the way, I stumbled across lye-based soaps. A cursory search found many folks were making soaps this way; my interest was immediately piqued.

My very first bar of soap: Lavender with Oatmeal and Honey

It took me several months of obsessive research, reading, video watching, and poring over www.millersoap.com before I made my first soap. That soap was made using olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil (which we no longer use), lye, water, colloidal oatmeal, honey (which darkened the soap), and lavender essential oil. I still have a bar of this soap! While I can't truly compare this soap to the ones I make now in quality (it's quite laughable really), at the time we LOVED and used up nearly every bar of this soap. It immediately replaced all of our soap; even my husband (who really just wants to be clean - who cares about the soap!) refused to use anything else. Audrey's little dry spots vanished, and along the way, my legs stopped having their flaky, dry patches. 

We were completely converted. This is why so often, you'll hear me say that handmade soap - ANY handmade soap - is going to be better than 99% of anything else you can buy. It took me many more years before I started to sell my soap, time that I am grateful that I spent because it allowed me to tweak and perfect my final recipes before selling, as well as the experience I gained in what happens when a soap batch goes wrong, what my soap looks like one (or five!) years out, how my scents age, and to see what my colorants will do (which is especially important when using plant-based colorants; not all of them perform equally!).

Logo!

But what's with the name, you ask? I didn't want to insert my kids, who are my ultimate inspirations, into my business model. Orchard Hill is my happy place. It's a grove of trees in bloom, bees buzzing, wind swishing through the leaves, a hammock strung between branches, and complete serenity. I actually think about it when I meditate and when I'm calming down at the end of the day, ready to go to sleep. It's the feeling I want someone to experience whenever they use something I make. I think of it before everything I make!