A: when it is a postcard! Let me elaborate – when it is one of the current craze of 4″ x 6″ postcards with a small quilted textile on one side and an address and stamp on the other. These objects go through the mail as part of organised swaps. That they give the makers and recipients a lot of pleasure is in no doubt. I visited one textile artist’s website yesterday to find she described her small works as quilts, ie 4″ x 6″ postcards. She’d done a lot of them and although they were only thumbnails and didn’t enlarge, some were very interesting. What I had difficulty with was her calling the decorated postcards ‘quilts’ . <\/p>\n
Quilting is a technique of stitching several layers of fabric together. The word ‘quilt’ commonly suggests bed coverings, but nowadays is taken to include a lot more such as wall quilts, art quilts, throws, lap quilts and more, but quilting can decorate or be used in the construction of many other objects, such as cushions, totebags, vests and more – yet we don’t term these things ‘quilts’. I think the word quilt has certain associations in addition to the technical construction, and that is that the whole object is quilted, and it lies or hangs, on its own, as it is. The minute you add some quilted fabric to a mount, a frame, onto a bag, or apply it as a pocket or a trim, the quilting becomes decoration to the object, and the object itself remains the important thing – a cushion, a totebag, an embroidered panel or picture. Or a postcard. It’s the gradual acceptance of these two words as interchangeable that I am objecting to. Fussy ? sure – among other things I am a retired teacher of english, and admit being inclined to the pedantic… your comments are welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A: when it is a postcard! Let me elaborate – when it is one of the current craze of 4″ x 6″ postcards with a small quilted textile on one side and an address and stamp on the other. These objects go through the mail as part of organised swaps. That they give the makers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-v","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}