Making creamy soap with goats' milk is a family business

Seven baby goats that looked and sounded like twice that number bleated for their mamas and got into mischief the other day at Maureen and Kevin Anderson's home in Virginia Beach's Pungo area.
Several were clambering up the wooden steps to the kitchen, bumping the kitchen door, jumping off the steps and then heading back up again.
Many of the eight Anderson children were right in the middle of the romp. They were holding one baby or another, bottle-feeding one or another or just herding a stray back into the fold.
The cavorting appeared to be great fun all around, but there was seriousness behind all the madness, and it is called Tasha's Own Hand Crafted Goat's Milk Soap.
The creamy soap, an Anderson family affair, is made in the same kitchen where the little goats knock against the door, and it is sold in some local gift shops and at craft fairs around the region.
Wrapped in materials with old-fashioned patterns, the soap comes in fragrances such as organic rosemary, Scottish oats and honey, lemongrass and camomile. The soap is shaped as a traditional bevel-edged bar or comes from a mold depicting, say, a bee or a horse ---- or a goat, of course.
Everyone pitches in to help with soap making. Kevin does the mixing, stirring the caustic lye into the goat's milk and other ingredients.
"He's the chemist," Maureen said.
Head goat keeper Maureen measures the oils and herbs. The children help to fill the molds, wrap the soap bars and bottle feed the young goats.
Daughter Ainslie, 11, also has contributed her own line to the soap products. She crochets little cotton soap bags with ties that each hold a bar of soap. It's like soap and a washcloth all in one.
And three mama goats contribute the milk, a lot of it. For several years, goat's milk has been the milk the Andersons drink day in and day out.
Maureen makes goat's milk cheese - herbal and mozzarella - and also makes kefir out of goat's milk. A little like yogurt, kefir goes into smoothies that they all drink daily.
The soap making did not begin until last summer. "We always wanted to," Maureen said. "We had the equipment around, and we always had the goats."
The Andersons decided to name the soap Tasha's Own after their "matriarch" goat, Tasha. The Anderson's first goat, she was named after children's author and illustrator Tasha Tudor.
"I grew up wanting my life to be like her illustrations," Maureen said.
All the goats are Nubian goats, like Tasha Tudor's. They are pretty, gentle looking animals with long, long ears and Roman noses.
"Nubians also have the highest butterfat content," Maureen said. And that makes for creamier milk, cheese and soap, too, of course.
 
Mary Reid Barrow, barrow1@cox.net.