Simply lane design

April's Story

April makes handmade quilts from her studio in Weatherford, Texas. Each quilt is made with care, meant to be used and loved, and hopefully passed down through a family.

SIMPLY LANE DESIGN

The Heart Behind the Quilts

Every quilt starts at my dining room table. One corner of that room is mine, and that’s where I work while the family comes and goes around me. I begin with the pattern. Then I pull fabrics and lay them out side by side until they tell me they belong together, and some days that takes a while. By the time I sit down to sew, I know where every stitch is going. I care how the corners meet, and I care about the parts nobody will ever look at. Each quilt still has a little character to it, the kind you’d find in a quilt your grandmother made. I hope yours ends up on the couch on cold nights, goes through the wash more times than you can count, and gets handed down someday.

The Making

Three parts of every piece

One — Selecting Fabrics

I rarely begin with a drawing. I begin with a fabric — usually one I've been carrying around for a while, folded on the corner of the table, waiting for the rest of the piece to catch up to it.

I look for cloth that has already lived a little: washed linen with an uneven hand, cottons that have softened, a length of indigo whose dye has moved. Colour matters, but texture is what decides. If a fabric doesn't change in the light through the day, it usually doesn't make it into a composition.

Two — Designing the Composition

Everything is worked out on the design wall, in full size. Pieces go up, come down, move an inch to the left, come down again. Some compositions settle in an afternoon; most take weeks of walking past them.

I don't sketch a plan and execute it. The arrangement is a record of the decisions as they actually happened — which is why the balance in a finished piece never feels symmetrical, only resolved.

Three — Hand Construction

Every seam, every join, every line of quilting is done here, by me. No team, no outsourcing, no second run. When a piece is finished, the composition is retired — I don't reproduce it, and I don't make a version of it in another colourway.

That's the part people feel before they can name it. Slight irregularity in a hand-cut edge. A quilting line that follows the eye instead of a ruler. It is the difference between something made and something manufactured.

Take a Look

New quilts are added often.

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, reach out to April about a custom quilt.