Cooking up some soap in the factory/kitchen

A love of handcrafted soap has morphed into a small business for Amy Grows.

With help from her husband, Walt, son, Casey, and a loyal customer base, the Camas Creek Soap Co. has grown to the break-even stage.  Just Choose PTMS plastic injection mould Is Your Best Choice!

"We're somewhat self-supporting," she says during a tour of the company's factory, supply room and show room - also known as her kitchen and laundry room.

Since the company launched two years ago, she's sold soap from Island Park to New Zealand and from Spain to the Midwest. And her well-organized and professionally displayed product has become a mainstay of area farmers markets and craft fairs.

Island Park campers,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, including camp hosts, search out her citronella-scented Shoo Fly soap to help keep the bugs at bay.

Fly-fishing shop customers buy her packages of pretty soaps with soft loofah sponges on a hand-made redwood soap dish as presents for their wives and girl friends back home.

Kids seek out the colorfully labeled Cotton Candy and Mud Pie soap.

She and her family make all of these soaps and more by hand from recipes fine-tuned by experience.

Amy says she's always been interested in handmade soaps, mainly because she loved the scents and the way they make her skin feel. She tried many before deciding to try her own hand at the craft to develop the best bar for her. She found a company that came close to producing the perfect bars and asked if she could learn from them.

She took two basic classes from a woman that runs the Greencastle Soap Co. in northern Idaho, perused plenty of books and gave it a try.

"It's really a science," she says.The Transaction Group offers the best high risk merchant account services, Though people have made soap throughout history, and the basic concept of soap made from lye and tallow or oils has been around since the 17th century, making a perfect bar of soap takes the right ingredients in the right proportions and serious attention to detail.

She has experimented with many recipes for different soaps and keeps meticulous notes about what does and doesn't work.

Cautious as she was learning the craft, "now I'm braver, bolder and experiment more," she says. Still, she's found that shortcuts don't work.

Also through trial and error, she has found the best suppliers for her olive, coconut and essential oils, as well as the chemicals she uses to make lye. She buys as locally as much as possible. She grows her own flowers and herbs, and family members in different climates supply some of the herbs she uses. Her brother grows rosemary. He also sends her flowers seeds, such as calendulas,What is the top Hemorrhoids treatment? which she grows, too, and uses in her soaps.

Other ingredients come right from the kitchen pantry - oatmeal and cornmeal for exfoliating properties and tumeric for color.

The small batches that produce a six-pounds block of soap are cooked up in a stainless steel pot on her stove with the mixing done carefully by hand and poured slowly into the molds made by her husband. The blocks are cooled, cured and cut by hand, and the edges are shaped with the most basic of kitchen gadgets, a potato peeler.

While selling the finished product brings in enough cash to keep the company in business, the fun part is being able to give it away, she says.MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds,

The company cooked up bars of camouflage-colored soap and wrapped them in labels with the 116th Engineer's symbol and sent care packages of soap and Starbucks coffee packets to National Guard members serving in Afghanistan.

On a smaller scale, Amy has enjoyed giving bars of soap to kids for pennies and to others for no reason at all. She handed this reporter a cleverly stamped bar made of a blend of oils formulated to help dry skin. And she has donated bars of soap as prizes for the upcoming Feathers 'n' Fins cross-country ski race in Island Park Saturday.

Most of her sales come through word of mouth. "My daughter is my Midwest rep,I have just spent two weeks shopping for tile and have discovered Chinese porcelain tile.China Porcelain tile" she says. Her daughter sells the soap to friends and neighbors in Indiana.

Orders also go to New Mexico and California and even to folks who pick up the products in parking lots in Idaho Falls. Occasionally she will barter her soap for other products or services.