Artist Debba Pearce and a Revamped Gardener's Bar

Back in the late winter and early spring, we set our efforts upon giving our Gardener's soap a few tweaks.  It had been scented with a blend of essential oils and fragrance oil, and our goal was to have it scented completely by pure essential oils.  After a lot of experimentation and the discovery of Katrafay essential oil, a very "green", complex oil from a tree grown in Madagascar, we were happy with our new fragrance blend.

While we loved the handmade paper the gardener's soap was wrapped in, we also wanted to upgrade the wrapper to a hand painted design that could feature a Vermont artist, as well as give us a little more color and a better fit for our brand.

I knew just the artist!

Please meet Debba Pearce, a watercolor and pastel artist and photographer from Shelburne, VT.

For those of you who joined us for Open Studio in 2013, you may remember Debba as our featured guest.  It was a rainy weekend, and she and her easel joined me in the pottery studio.  I love Debba's work, and in particular the way she uses and understands color.  I knew her florals would make a gorgeous, colorful wrapper, well suited for a gardener's soap, and we were delighted when Debba agreed to take on our project.

One of Debba's earlier works that I had fallen in love with was the inspiration for our wrapper. (See the notecard in the photo, above.)  Debba painted a new work for us in a similar style that would accommodate our logo and scent name band.  It was perfect! Her original is below, along with the finished wrapper.

Thanks, Debba, for the beautiful new wrapper!

To learn more about Debba and her work, please visit her website, www.halexdesigns.com. Her notecards are available for purchase in our studio shop.

If you are a Vermont painter, and would like to have your work featured on our soap wrappers, please contact us for more information.