The Toil in Toile

September 22, 2026

Last year I entered my first-ever toile design into a Spoonflower challenge — a tongue-in-cheek little thing called Birds & Birders — and came away with 2nd place. Toiles are, and I say this with love, a toil to draw. Every branch, every bird, every tiny etched leaf, one careful line at a time. And yet I keep coming back to them. I don’t fully understand it myself: they’re traditional in a way I wouldn’t expect to love, all that formal repetition and old-world restraint, but there’s something about the etching-style line work and the sheer discipline of the format that gets me every time.

So when Modern Toile came up as the next challenge, I had one job: make a toile that still felt like a toile, but earned the word “modern.” Naturally, I started big. My first idea was an ode to Lake Park here in Milwaukee — a genuinely world-class, Olmsted-designed park I grew up running around in, and, as it happens, the exact spot where I got married a few years back. It felt like the right kind of ambitious. It was also, it turned out, more design than I had time for. That one’s shelved, not scrapped — Lake Park will get its moment eventually, on its own timeline.

What I landed on instead needed a lot less runway and, turns out, is still an homage to the park told in the form of a spring love story. Lake Park is well known for its excellent birding, especially in spring and fall when an enormous number of migratory warblers stop in this beautiful place on the way elsewhere. The design features nesting bird pairs, spring buds and blooms, a baby squirrel figuring out its legs, and hearts carved into the bark for anyone patient enough to look for them. It’s my own little homage to marriage and to my husband, tucked into a toile instead of said out loud. There’s even a small love note hidden in the design, just for him, if you know where to look. (I’m not telling. Some things are just for us.)

The design

Toile de Vie takes the classic toile de Jouy format — etched line work, repeating vignettes, the whole formal vocabulary — and gives it a color transplant. I entered it in aqua for the challenge, but it’s also available in blossom pink, spring green, and sky blue, because a love story deserves more than one mood.