Michelle Stewart:  

Life My Job I started soap making soon after my daughter was born, as a hobby. I loved doing it. I started with only melt and pour soap, and came to the realization that melt and pour, though an art form to be sure, wasn't actually MAKING soap. It was reSHAPING soap. So I taught myself to make REAL soap, from water and lye and veggie oils and butters. Eventually, I found I had 200 pounds of soap piling up in the basement, and all my friends had more soap than they knew what to do with! I had started peddling my soaps at craft fairs and the like. Some small stores were even carrying my soaps! Then one day tragedy struck our family. A very close family member had been diagnosed with cancer and underwent an extremely high dose of radiation therapy for treatment of an "incurable tumor". The best hope the doctors had was that the radiation would slow the rate of the tumors' growth thereby extending the life of this person. Since I was a soap maker, I was asked to develop a skin cream to remedy the burns that would undoubtedly be sustained. (How anyone came to the conclusion that I could even MAKE a skin cream from scratch, let alone one that would do anything for crispy burned skin was beyond me, but I rose to the challenge, and taught myself how to make creams and lotions as well!) After 3 months o...Expand for more