Quinn Kelley, founder of Chicken Hill Farm Handmade Soaps, with Skye the Auracana. Photo by Joe Damone.
Summer in the Catskills means it's the height of craft fair season once again, and Quinn Kelley, the 15-year-old proprietor of Chicken Hill Farm Handmade Soaps in Delhi, is gearing up for an annual tradition: staffing a booth at the Meredith Dairy Fest, held this Saturday and Sunday on Catskill Turnpike Road in Meredith.
Since Kelley started her soap business at the tender age of eleven, she's won $1,000 in a national entrepreneurship competition, forged a sales deal with the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida, and had her soap-making business profiled in the Daily Star.
The soaps are pretty nifty: brightly-colored and glycerin-based, with a lot of cool two-tone designs. And a fair chunk of Kelley's profits go to a good cause: the care and upkeep of a motley menagerie of rescued animals, of the flying, creeping and walking variety. (Kelley wants to be a veterinarian; with over a dozen animals in her care, she's getting a head start.)
Ya savvy?We're a bit biased, naturally. (Kelley's my first cousin.) But more to the point, everybody at Watershed Post HQ is a terrible sucker for pirates.
With another blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movie recently arrived in theaters, we suspect Chicken Hill Farm's "Ahoy, Matey" soap is going to sell like hotcakes at the Dairy Fest this weekend. If you've got a would-be Captain Jack Sparrow in your life, you might want to stock up. You know how pirates are about hygiene.
