Seraphim Soapmakers Cynthia Dilling and Ed Gutkowski move just-poured soap molds to a curing box.

by Debby Hatch

Seraphim soap has lathered Lopez skin for the last fifteen years and bars of it in Seraphim’s signature cardboard box and wrap-around label have become favorite gifts. I visited soap makers Cynthia Dilling and Ed Gutkowski recently at their soap shop to learn more about their local cottage industry and to watch as this sister/brother team made a batch of soap.

Sweet and spicy fragrances led me to the door of the soap shop, a small two-storey building set in a garden. Inside, surrounded by ingredients for soap, Ed and Cynthia put on aprons, elbow-length gloves and face shields and got to work. “Today we’re making Bay soap,” Cynthia said as she stepped onto a low stool next to a 20-gallon stainless steel pot suspended between two triangular supports and dipped what looked like a rowboat paddle into the pot. “This is a very low tech operation!” Cynthia said, laughing. “Someone at Island Marine Center gave me this oar when I was starting out.”

As she began stirring, Cynthia explained that this soap base was called Palma Christi, a mixture of olive, palm, coconut, and castor oils as well as grapefruit seed extract as an antioxidant. Ed added a mixture of olive oil and chlorophyll for the color and then began adding pitchers of lye: sodium hydroxide mixed with rainwater.

Continuing to stir, Cynthia said that she would soon begin looking for the trace. “I pick up the oar and dribble on to the top and a little mark—a trace—will show us it has reached a certain point and we can add the essential oil—today the essential oils of West Indian bay—along with benzoin resin to help set the fragrance. We do two tracings, one now and one after we add more liquid. And then it’s ready to pour. That’s it.”

Cynthia began the pour by tipping the soap pot to fill Ed’s smaller kettle.  Then Ed poured the contents of the kettle into the waiting soap molds, and they repeated these steps until all the molds were full with what would become 320 bars of soap. Finally, working together, they lifted the molds and set them in an insulated box below the counter where the natural chemical processes that produce soap would continue.

Turning to a lyre-like device on the counter, Cynthia said: “Here’s how we cut the soap. We take the big bars from the molds and lay them down here and pull the wires over them,” adding proudly that her grandson, an engineer, made both this tool and the mixing pot. The bars that emerge from this cutter go upstairs to cure for a month or more before being packaged.

We sat down to talk about the business Cynthia started in her kitchen fifteen years ago as a way to pay the mortgage. Ed laughed as he remembered saying to her, “do you realize how many bars of soap you’re going to have to sell to make the mortgage?” “But I was determined that this was going to work,” Cynthia said. “Fortunately I was younger,” she added as they both laughed. “I niggled at it until I was finally able to figure it out.”

Today they sell their soap wholesale to vendors on the west coast and east as far as Wisconsin and retail at the Lopez Farmers market. Year round, it’s available on Lopez at Blossom, the Pharmacy and the Fudge Factory. They also make an insect repelling spritz, a lavender spritz, and a lotion bar.

“We use the very best ingredients we can buy: oils, essential oils. We don’t cut corners. It’s as good as we can make it,” Ed said. “We get oils from all over the world,” Cynthia added, “but we try to avoid things that are not sustainably harvested.”

They also have fun: coming up with new scents, like chocolate, designing labels and writing the stories that describe each scent. “We do the story part together. It’s really fun,” Cynthia said. They like the structure the business gives to their lives. And, as brother and sister who’ve always gotten along, Ed added: “It’s nice at the end of our lives to be together again and to be doing this.”