A conversation with Linda Quiring
“In the beginning, I had absolutely no idea of starting a business… never mind a soap business!”
When Linda Quiring and her husband Bill moved to Salt Spring Island, they weren’t looking to start a business. Like many who arrived on Salt Spring in the early 1970s, Linda Quiring and her husband Bill were searching for a quieter, more self-sufficient way of life.
“The first thing I did was begin planting, as I had always done,” she recalls.
Like many at the time, Linda was an avid reader of Harrowsmith magazine, where she discovered a growing interest in herbs and their traditional uses. One herb in particular caught her attention: comfrey.
“I ordered a special variety of comfrey root from England — Russian Comfrey. It was expensive at the time, but known as one of the best plants for healing,” she says. “And amazingly, I still have that same root growing in my garden today.”
Linda had struggled with sensitive skin for much of her life and found many commercially produced soaps and shampoos too harsh for her skin. As she began learning more about herbs and their traditional uses, comfrey especially caught her attention for its skin-healing qualities.
Once the comfrey was established in her garden, she found a recipe for a comfrey salve in a herbal reference book and decided to try making it herself.
“I still remember a cut I had on my hand that healed up thanks to comfrey.”
She began sharing jars of the salve with friends, who were equally enthusiastic.
“It became my first ‘product,’” she says. “I had just been giving it away, but now folks offered to pay for it. Wow!”
Around the same time, Linda also began experimenting with herbal shampoo recipes. Because of her very sensitive skin and scalp, many shampoos on the market irritated her due to the harsh detergents they contained.
The herbal recipe she found called for a soap base — but finding a true natural soap turned out to be nearly impossible.
“The recipe had herbs, and a soap base… no detergent!!” she recalls.
“At that time, there were no handmade soap companies, and I didn’t realize that most commercial ‘soap’ bars were actually detergent bars… until I tried to find a natural soap bar.”
She even spoke with a retired cosmetic chemist living on Salt Spring Island.
“Said there was no such thing!”
But Linda remembered something from childhood.
“My old granny was a midwife… and she made soap for her sixteen children.”
Determined to figure it out herself, she searched through books at the library in Victoria until she finally found an old soap recipe in a chemistry book. It was beef tallow based.
She visited a local butcher shop, where they happily gave her beef tallow to experiment with. Armed with lye and a recipe, Linda made her first batch of soap — around fifty bars in total.
With more soap than she knew what to do with, Linda began sharing bars with friends. But the soap had originally been created for a very specific reason: she was trying to make an herbal shampoo gentle enough for her sensitive skin.
The shampoo itself was made with herbs from the garden and worked beautifully at first.
But there was one problem.
“After a few days it turned brown and went bad because it didn’t have preservatives,” she says with a laugh. “Lesson learned.”
The shampoo may not have lasted, but the soap did.
The difference in her hand made soap compared to the store-bought soap surprised her.
“The three of us — Bill, thirteen-year-old Gary, and I — went through a bar of soap in about three days. Started using mine… the first bar lasted about two to three weeks!”
“O.k. guess I will be making soap for the rest of my life.”
Not long after, a friend invited Linda to join her at one of the very first craft fairs on Salt Spring Island. Her friend was bringing knitting. Linda packed up a few of her herbal creations — comfrey salves, baby sleep sachets — and almost as an afterthought, brought along some of her soap bars.
“What a shock!” she says. “The plain, white, unscented $2.00 soap bars were gone in minutes!”
“No one had ever seen handmade soap before.”
Still, she never imagined any of it would become a business.
“It was just a really fun hobby.”
