Lotions, potions and oils
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Rachel Miller’s daughter, Audrey, smile at the image of her herself as an angel that accompanies the poems her mother wrote when she first began her business.
Leopards bane is one of the healing herbs that Rachel Miller grows year-round in her greenhouse apothecary.
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By Colleen Nelson
It all began as “an eBay thing with wholesale European socks.”
Rachel Miller’s kitchen, tucked into the hill half a mile from the road to Mather, was sweet with the good smells of essential oils and filled with potted plants, jars of infused herbal oils and a well-lit island dominated by an industrial strength mixer.
Shelves of curing soap, some cut, some still in long wooden trays, lined one wall, framing the dining room-turned-office of Miller’s home-grown business that traces its lineage back to that big bundle of wildly colored socks, ordered on eBay in 2001.
“The computer was my best friend. It opened doors and I didn’t have to leave this room,” Miller said, pouring another round of herb tea. “I got those socks for 50 cents a pair and sold them on eBay two pairs for $15. I was amazed. Here was something I could do at home to make money. I didn’t drive so it was a real blessing.”
In 2001 Miller and her husband, Paul, were Pittsburgh transplants, having left the turmoil of the city to raise their six children in the country, on acreage that included a fine creek and a forest to browse for medicinal plants and be inspired by. When Paul left for work, “I spent most of my time at home gardening, canning, making soap, and doing things like I learned from my grandparents.
We didn’t shop at the drug store, we used herbs like peppermint, yarrow, willow, elderberry and mullein. Nature has everything you need if you know where to look.”
As her children grew and began to leave home, Miller turned her hours of isolation and love for the natural world around her into poetry, first for her family, then for friends. The money she’d socked away from her eBay bonanza was about to launch Autumn’s Boutique, not with soaps and lotions, but with the written word.
“If it weren’t for Debbie Wagner, none of this would have happened,” Miller admitted. “She was the postmaster in Mather and I was always walking to the post office to mail packages and letters. We became friends. One day I was mailing a poem to my sister and she asked, ‘can you write one for my sister?’ and I did. Then she asked to see more of my stuff and I brought her a box of my poems. The next time I went to get my mail she gave me a flier for the Monroeville Expo. It cost $500 to enter, which was what I had saved from those socks. I framed and matted my poems and got Paul to drive me up there. Much to my surprise I sold out and that’s what got me started.”
Miller’s partner in creativity was her daughter, Audrey, now 18 and a graphic design and business major at Bradford School in Pittsburgh, who went with her mom to shows and appeared on many of the framed poems as the angel for all seasons in outfits that Miller designed and sewed.
Miller’s lotions, teas and healing salves for her family began to appear alongside her poems at shows, fairs and powwows. Herbal teas, fresh picked and dried from gardens, fields and forests were well received. The plants that made up those teas became the healing ingredients of skin care products that Miller makes from scratch in her kitchen.
“I knew a lot about plants but there were classes on the Internet that I took to learn more. I learned to make soap and I found a source for emu oil online from a farmer in Indiana. I get my raw goats milk from two local farmers and we sometimes barter. When you buy local you help the whole community and best of all I know what’s in the products I sell. It’s all natural and chemical free.”
When Miller created her first scents from essential oils, many infused at home, she had a memory in mind. “I remembered a perfume called Cody that I loved as a teenager and tried to capture it. I think I came close. If I can duplicate an aroma then I name it and add it to my product line.”
Miller took Autumn’s Boutique on the road to festivals and events, building a clientele of repeat customers who sought out her booth each year to buy or to place custom orders, tailored to their needs.
“In the beginning I wanted people who didn’t know me to try my products because they weren’t buying it just because they knew me. It built my confidence. After a few years I started doing local festivals but it was the farmers’ markets that really connected me with my neighbors and I got a lot of local attention. Carol Patterson invited me to my first farmers market in Waynesburg and that’s all it took.”
It was on another invitational, this one to a powwow in Woodland, Pa., to celebrate the birth of a white buffalo that Miller learned from the tribal women what native plants they used and how they used them – jewel weed, chickweed, plantain, cohosh, coltsfoot and comfrey.
“So many of the plants we’ve hybridized have native cousins. Impatiens are related to jewelweed and rose-o-Sharon is in the hibiscus family. Many of them have the same healing properties. Black walnut is antifungal, calendula soothes the skin and is good for burns and minor cuts and coltsfoot is good for respiration. I put the parts I use in olive oil and set the jars in the sun to infuse. In six to eight weeks they’re ready.”
Miller’s little heated greenhouse is a winter haven for an eclectic assortment of plants. Leopards bane spreads its spotted leaves beside a healthy growth of mullein, dug from the woods in the fall and ready to be added to a fresh batch of respiratory tea. Saffron crocus bulbs were sprouting from a long tray of potting soil, and some had put forth purple petals adorned with the long bright orange stamens that are, ounce for ounce, more expensive than gold.
Outside, the perennial patches of calendula, chamomile, raspberries and rugosa roses hunkered down, waiting for spring.
That latest batch of soap curing on the shelf, dragon’s blood, a rich mixture of goats milk infused with vanilla, patchouli and sandalwood, showed off its pedigree, not just with smell, but with the rich brown color that only real vanilla can bring.
A new brochure, fresh from the printer, offered testimony to the triple refined emu oil that is the star of Miller’s Autumn’s Boutique product line: “A powerful moisturizer that penetrates deep into the skin. Studies done at Boston University have shown that emu oil may actually stimulate skin cell regeneration…” Vogue Magazine, “Emu oil practically erases fine lines…” Los Angeles Times.
The names of the products listed offer a glimpse into Miller’s creative whimsy, Devotion Lotion, Flamingo Breeze, Dancing Bananas and Frumpalumpkin.
When spring comes again you’ll find this cheerful, busy, and rather inspiring woman and her Autumn’s Boutique at the Waynesburg Farmers’ Market, along with fellow growers and home grown entrepreneurs, each with tables full of what nature, hard work and creative perseverance have to offer. But until then, Miller can be found in her sweet smelling home-office-laboratory- kitchen, happily at work cutting bars, filling jars, affixing labels and making fresh batches of what repeat customers can’t seem to get enough of year round.