The Making Of: Darlin'
Meet Toni Darling of Toni Darling Frank! Toni is the artist behind our new Darlin’ puzzle. Her work is all about bringing joy to everyday objects and exudes a sense of happiness and ease in every piece. Her ceramic creations add a touch of cottage-core whimsy to any space.
Toni is from Ontario, Canada, loves baking pineapple cake, and is a Sagittarius! She has about 16 nicknames — and they’re all as cute as she is.
Get to know more about Toni below and learn how the Darlin’ puzzle came to life!
Above: The start of making Darlin'
Above: BTS of placing Toni's ceramic tiles together for her puzzle
To kick off the project we asked Toni to paint 100 ... yes 100!!! individual tiles. Our only requirement was that no two tiles could be exactly the same.
Shop Darlin'We were already fans of Toni’s work, so when she agreed to make a puzzle with us we were thrilled! We felt that a grid style puzzle using her drawings would make a super fun puzzle to solve. To kick off the project we asked Toni to paint 100 ... yes 100!!! individual tiles. Our only requirement was that no two tiles could be exactly the same. The subject matter and design could be repeated, as long as the colors were switched up. This made the puzzle a bit easier—since there were no exact duplicates.
A few months later, Toni brought all 100 tiles to our studio in Brooklyn, where we experimented with different layouts and arrangements. We all agreed that we liked the tiles to appear in the puzzle at the same size as they are in real life, which worked out to about 7 rows of 5 tiles.
Narrowing the 100 tiles down to just 35 was nearly impossible!
Photographing the tiles proved to be tricky, we quickly realized the spaces between them felt a little empty. Because of the small grooves, the tiles didn’t sit flush against each other, leaving noticeable gaps in between.
We couldn’t permanently grout them onto a surface (since Toni would be taking the tiles back after the shoot). So we decided to use blue clay to fake a grout line between each tile. It was a bit of a silly, painstaking task, but it ended up being relatively clean and fully removable.
We love how the blue lines break up the tiles even more, giving the puzzle a bolder, more graphic feel.
And voilà, our little Darlin’ was born.
