beautiful bug busters

Who doesn’t enjoy sitting on the porch on a mild summer evening? Anyone whose sweet skin is tasty to mosquitos, that’s who. Even if you can get past the heat (shade and misters usually will do the trick), the bugs often prove too much to handle. And aside from heat and flying creepies, nothing spoils an al fresco dinner party more than the scent and stick of bug spray. Eww. Fortunately a Forest Hills family possessing long-proven olfactory prowess came up with the perfect solution in their Skeeter Screen line of mildly scented pest deterrents. In the early ’70s, Mark Stuart’s family had a little retail shop in Old Town shopping center. He worked the register when he was 10, went to Bishop Lynch High School, moved away, went to college and started a family before moving back to Forest Hills, next door to his parents’ (his childhood) home. “I didn’t realize how much I loved that neighborhood until I moved away,” he says. Stuart’s parents John and Jean, both schooled scientists, turned the business into a perfumery. They eventually moved their store, Scent Shop, to Garland. Now it’s all things fragrance — candles, sprays, oils, soaps, you name it — and Stuart, his two brothers and his parents, now in their 80s, run the store. The Skeeter Screen products are so popular that many neighborhood stores — Tee Hee Greetings, Sample House and the Dallas Arboretum gift shop, for example — also sell them. Skeeter Screen items are made with the Stuart family’s blend of all-natural essential oils from cedar, rosemary, peppermint, clove and thyme. The mix emits a scent that is pleasant to humans yet unbearable to mosquitos. The line includes candles, sprays, reed diffusers and, most recently, the popular patio egg. “It’s a ceramic egg, a universal symbol,” Stuart notes. He says his mom’s decorative ostrich egg inspired the idea. The small aesthetic egg eliminates most bugs within 200-300 square feet and works for months.

VISIT SCENTSHOP.COM or call 800.527.4190 for more information about the Scent Shop and Stuart family products.

—Christina Hughes Babb

Loaves Of Fun

After Christine Carey divorced a few years ago, she needed a way to make a little money and still be home in time to pick her three kids up from school. The design degree she earned in the ’90s was a bit outdated, since so much had changed since then, and she needed a flexible schedule. “I knew how to bake bread and do a lot of stuff like that,” she says. “So I thought, ‘I’ll just start baking bread and selling it at the farmers markets.’ ” That’s how her startup, We Me Bakery, came to be. Carey lived for four years in Spain where she learned to bake the rustic Spanish bread that is the foundation of her business. The neighborhood resident also produces sauces and spreads that complement the bread. She recently started making pimento cheese, which Cox Farms Market in Duncanville and the online grocer Greenling have picked up. Greenling has told her it will buy any in-season prepared foods she can make, but Carey is operating on what she calls “a snail economy.” “I do everything for my kids first,” she says. “And I work during the school day.” Carey has a kitchen and a booth at the Grand Prairie Farmers Market, where she sells her wares from 8 a.m.-1 p.m. every Saturday. In the wintertime, she also has a spot at the Coppell Farmers Market. She has a few personal chef clients in the neighborhood. And she brings five loaves of bread a week to the Coffee Co. in Lakewood. She’s fine with keeping the business very small. “If someone gave me $250,000, I would buy a big kitchen and hire help and expand,” she says. “But I don’t want to be in debt.”

—Rachel Stone

FIND OUT MORE at wemedallas.com