Meet Designer Abby Foster of Toile and Stripes in Suttons Bay

When she was in her early 20s, musical theater actor and dancer Abby Foster had a major complaint with clothing she’d find to wear when not on stage. The clothes not only didn’t flow; they also didn’t allow a young mom with a new baby the freedom to do what she needed to do throughout her day: look and feel good (but not fussy) when getting down on the floor with an infant, running errands, hiking with friends and then heading off to meet with business colleagues.

When her mother gifted her a sewing machine at age 21, Foster says her first thought was, “This skill has to be outdated … In my complete ignorance, I thought, ‘No one is doing this anymore.’”

Before long, the now-owner of Suttons Bay’s Toile and Stripes clothing boutique had discovered an active community on Instagram—makers who inspired her to create clothing she had before only hoped existed. In doing so, she realized an undiscovered talent and love for design that has garnered a cult following for her line of sustainable handmade clothing for real-life pursuits.

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Artsy Beginnings

Foster spent several school-year summers at Interlochen Center for the Arts, returning later for more in-depth study there and at an arts-focused boarding school in California. But the art of clothing design was a totally new pursuit, honed by buying and devouring patterning textbooks, then using her home space in a guest house on her parents’ Northport property where she’d lived since her elementary years, to sketch, cut patterns and lay them out on the floor.

“I just fell in love,” she says. “The whole construction process is so fun to me. It’s a giant puzzle.”

As it turned out, Foster’s sense of body movement from dance—the way you have to be aware of not only how your own body moves but also the bodies of others with whom you’re dancing—offered an advantage. Foster shares that she proved especially adept at what’s called flat patterning, something distinct from the drape patterning you might see on “Project Runway” where designers build the piece on a mannequin and later lay it flat and cut. With flat patterning, “You’ve got rulers, pencils, pens and you’re essentially drawing out one-dimensional shapes that get cut out of that paper to become two dimensional,” Foster explains. “Then you cut them out of fabric to fit a 3D model. I was a terrible math student, but I could see the shapes. This math made sense to me.”

In 2017, she set up an online shop called Toile and Stripes, the name she’d previously given to a running blog of her creative design process. Her formula for success was completed by adding in her genuine desire to help other women live better lives and an artist’s eye and sensibility that uses stunning textiles as a base, says friend and frequent customer Kelsey McQuown, a Leland-based jewelry designer. Like the best of artists, Foster wants each piece to go to a customer who will wear the work, love it and live in it.

“She has such an eye for how to style pieces in multiple ways and stretch them out to be versatile and useful in different seasons and types of events,” McQuown says. “She’s not precious. She’d be the first to tell you to wear her piece doing anything—cooking, running around in the yard, going to the beach. It’s about living in the clothing.”

While Foster still sells a majority of her clothing online, in April 2021, she moved her sewing studio out of her home to a sunny spot with a bay view that holds both workspace and her own retail space. An unexpected boom in sales at the start of the pandemic helped fund the expansion. “People were home with more time on their hands, and they were connecting with me on Instagram, looking to support small businesses and building their wardrobes,” Foster says.

Sales increased between 500 and 700 percent over the past three years, and her once online-only customers have taken vacations centered around meeting the maker of their favorite clothing and adding to their wardrobe staples. It was still a risk to take on retail space amid an ever-evolving pandemic, but the perfect spot opened up as her customers continued to clamor for a brick and mortar store. With clothes Foster describes as having an investment price point, customers want to try them on, be sure they fit as they’d hoped and talk to the person who made them.

“I always said, ‘I’m keeping it in my home until it’s lucrative enough to get out,’” says Foster. “This past April, that happened.”

The Secret

As the music of another Interlochen alum, Norah Jones, plays on the music system of her Suttons Bay shop, Foster looks luminous as she stands before a collection that’s a muted rainbow of soft blue-grays, sand, cream and forest greens with the occasional pop of the gold of a garden mum. Elsewhere in the store, she’s displayed a circle of colorful napkins she makes from her fabric scraps, along with handmade candles, journals and tea made by other artisans and the rare clothing pieces she doesn’t make herself: sweaters hand-knitted in Africa, each signed by the artist with a note about how many hours went into the piece.

The bulk of the store is dedicated to Foster’s handiwork, and she could sign each of her pieces, too, if she so chose. She’s the one designing every piece in her T&S label, ordering the fabric from countries like the United Kingdom and sewing each garment by hand. As she turns 30, with a fiancé and a son who is now 9, she’s creating those garments to fit her own lifestyle and, she says, that of the many artistic, hard-working and entrepreneurial women who inspire her—pieces she intentionally creates to be not overly embellished or super trendy but to be simple, beautiful and draw the eyes to the person wearing them.

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As she points to her “line worker dress,” a simple tank-style dress with a vintage feel, she notes it was her third or fourth design and one created when she was home sewing full time and needing something akin to a 1940s factory worker dress for herself, but with a bit more style. “I needed something simple I could do errands in, meet people to show them my designs, and I needed just one pocket for my phone.”

Her line staple, the “Kat pants,” are comfortable and trouser-like, cropped to hit just above the ankle to be worn with boots in winter, over a bathing suit in summer and to be something anyone can “always grab and know it’s comfortable and it looks good on me,” she explains. Ditto the roomy but slightly tailored

“Grandpa shirt” that she’s wearing this day in a black that matches her boots, tucked into the waist of her gold skirt.

Other pieces come and go, like a tunic in a creamy oatmeal-colored wool, inspired by a design from the Middle Ages, or the European-style “Karl tunic,” named after a grandfather who came from Germany and that cleverly combines the concepts of the basic black dress with that of a comfortable hooded sweatshirt.

“I’d say there’s a universal thread throughout our customers that they’re looking for workhorse pieces,” Foster continues. “They want a dress they can wear in the spring, put a jacket over in the fall or put a sweater with in winter. I always tell people, ‘I know the clothes are more expensive, I understand that. And we try really hard to keep the prices as low as possible and fair for what the work and fabric are worth. But if you’re wearing something a couple of days a week, it can come out to pennies per wear.’ And I think it might be worth investing in more than fast fashion pieces made out of polyester that won’t biodegrade for hundreds of years.”

Subtly Evoking Michigan’s North

Foster’s customers hail from across the country. Many are based in Northern Michigan, but just as many are in Los Angeles, New York City, Colorado or Maine. When they say they want to wear a piece of Michigan’s north, she surmises they’re talking about the way life is lived differently here. Local women who wear, inspire and test her designs are artists, chiropractors, entrepreneurs and goat farmers.

“There’s a common thread of that Northern Michigan lifestyle,” she says. “I know they’re going out hiking, they’re being active. They appreciate the lake. There’s something magical and very attractive about that.”

Designing with that much nature in mind meant that while sustainability didn’t start out as a key part of the brand, that’s how it evolved. “Most of the early samples of fabric I got were synthetics, and I said, ‘It doesn’t feel good to me,’” Foster recalls. “I went down a rabbit hole and learned how synthetics biodegrade and said, ‘Oh my goodness. No.’ I saved up a bunch of money and did my first collection in linen and cotton, and I was so happy with what it turned out to be. I loved the feel of it and decided I’m not going back.

“When you’re done with a piece—if you wear it to shreds, it’s ripped and it’s done—you can put it in your garden and between three and six months later it’s gone and all your plants will grow, no problem.”

Looking Ahead

Foster faces the challenges of every artistic entrepreneur: Do you add retail space overhead to the already existing costs of fabric, tags, thread, needles, machine oil, tools? And then there is the ongoing challenge to continually be creative, especially when not in a traditional tourist season.

“When it starts to slow down, you ask, is the market looking for something different? Have I not been engaging enough?” she says. “You’re constantly navigating what your customers want to know about you and the product you’re creating and how to share that in a way they’re able to understand and grasp.”

The main challenge now is keeping up with her success. Foster is sewing full-time and some weeks selling everything she is able to make. She’s considering adding another maker to her team and would love to, one day, open a manufacturing facility through which she could teach other women this marketable skill.

“But it’s been good,” she says. “I’m so unbelievably happy with the response I’ve gotten from people who like the clothing.” Foster acknowledges that the work can get overwhelming but adds, customer support makes all the difference. “It’s easier to be overwhelmed when you have people who are like, ‘We love it, and we want to buy it, whenever it comes out.’”

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Courtney Kent is one-half of The Compass Points Here, a photography and videography company based in Traverse City.