How This All Began I recently posted on Facebook and asked our Fans to tell me what they would like to read about in my website Blog. Several Fans asked to hear the story of how I began making soap and how Canyon Creek Soap Company was born. In 1999, I was a homemaker and a mother of one young baby boy and pregnant with my second son. I have always been a fan of natural, simple living and so I had a garden, I cooked from scratch, nursed my son, used cloth diapers and made and pureed his baby food. I made curtains, seat covers, pillows and other items that beautified our home. I also made most of our gifts for holidays, birthdays, weddings and baby showers - such things as crocheted afghans, handmade books, handcrafted cards, cookie mixes, sauces, wine glass markers, jewelry, etc. You name it, I was trying to make it by hand or cook it from scratch! At the time, I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma and I had two dear friends that also had young babies and we spent a lot of time together sharing our crafts while sipping coffee and playing with our babies. Deb and Kelli were also passionate about natural living and making their homes comfortable for their growing families. One day, I was teaching them about meal planning and "freezer cooking", where one cooks large batches of recipes and freezes smaller portions, allowing for great homecooked food on a budget. We were all homemakers whose husbands provided the main family income, so we were budget minded and all cared about serving our families meals that didn't contained processed ingredients. One of the ladies, Kelli, spoke up while we were cooking and said she made handmade soap and wanted to teach Deb and I to make soap. Neither Deb nor I had used handmade soap before and though we were intrigued, after Kelli described the use of lye and how dangerous it was, we were leary to learn since we all had small children. After a time, we decided to spend a Saturday morning learning, while the husbands spent time with our children. Kelli took us through the process of mixing the lye and water, melting the oils and butters, letting them cool and then mixing them together. We added fragrance and color and put it in the mold. We eagerly peeked at the soap over the 24 hour period it was wrapped and going through the "saponification" process, where it would heat up and cool down and change colors. Kelli explained the process of saponification and how soapmaking is an exothermic chemical process - a chemical reaction where the mixing of ingredients creates its own heat just by having the ingredients mixed together. It is much like baking a cake, where ingredients are mixed together and blended and put in a cake pan, except cake baking is an endothermic chemical process - one which requires heat to be added before the reaction will occur. The ingredients of the cake are not at all like the finished product. Items like sugar, vanilla, baking soda, cocoa, flour, eggs, olive oil - many of which do not taste good alone - blend together and create a completely different and wonderful product that we love to eat! The saponification process is similar in that we use oils and butters that if we simply rubbed them on our skin would moisturize, but wouldn't clean and would leave us feeling greasy. Lye - which is poisonous to us outside the saponification process and can blind you or leave you with nasty chemical burns - when mixed with the water, tea or milk and then added to the oils creates a chemical reaction that transforms these individual ingredients into what is chemically a "salt" that we call soap. The handmade soap cleans our bodies, and contains naturally occuring glycerine which is a byproduct of the saponification process. The glycerine and other oils and butters used in the recipes moisturize and soften our skin, unlike a commercially made soap, which has all the natural glycerin removed and sold off to lotion companies and is often harsh and drying. I can't say how thankful I am to Kelli for teaching Deb and I to make soap. It instantly intrigued me and I marveled at the beauty, lovely fragrance and fabulous feel on my skin of this handmade soap. I began making it for my family and for gifts and have not purchased a bar of soap from the store in 12 years! Tune in to the next edition of the Blog and I'll tell you why and when I started Canyon Creek Soap Company .... 7 1/2 years ago!