Toile is everywhere this season!  Look all around you, gentle reader. Chances are high that you will find a lovely pastoral scene with rural 16th-century lovers fetching well-water for the Sun King, or scampering naughtily underneath willow trees playing tin whistles.  Somewhere.  A handbag, or a scarf, perhaps?  Maybe you'll see toile on pencils, sofas, pinochle cards...nonfunctional tea sets!  

It isn't that difficult! Yes! It's a toile wonderland!

Exquisite Dead Guy has jumped upon the fashion goat-cart and developed its own toile pattern, by way of ME.  
I like to call it 'Industrial Revolution Toile.'  This lovely scene, hand-sketched during the boredom of being stuck at work, depicts a beautiful, buxom "woman of the streets," encouraging a VERY young coal-miner to head back into the mountains.  In the background, we see a beautiful factory, belching a beautiful plume of smoke into the sky - the result of the lad's hard work.  

This toile was inspired by the England of the Williams Blake and Morris, and also by Dirk and Megan thinking that it would be pretty funny to have a toile parody.  Feel free to use it on your site, your bathroom wallpaper, your pyjama trousers - whereever you feel Industrual Revolution Toile is necessary.  

It might make you start singing "Jerusalem" in an off-key contralto, or reading How Green Was My Valley or something.....

-Alice Teeple, July 2003