Interior decorating: Patchwork and wallpaper

A neighbour of ours in Michigan makes a new patchwork quilt every year. She designs and sews hundreds of bits of leftover cloth together in traditional patterns — a labour of love that takes months — and then invites over a circle of woman friends to help her do the quilting itself. They sit together around a big quilting frame, stitching the layers together by hand. It's extremely time-consuming, but the handcrafted product is really eye-catching. So who keeps the quilt after so many women have worked on it together? Nobody! It's donated to a local fund-raiser, and then raffled off. My family was lucky enough to win the quilt one year. It's become a family heirloom.

Old-style patchwork quilts like ours are still very popular, but modern-art quilts are answering modern-day creative and decorative needs (see "Quilt City, USA" in Spotlight 2/2010). Quilts have moved from the bed to the wall:

This month's design feature on quilts follows last month's on an ongoing revolution in wallpaper (Spotlight 1/2010). Throughout the decorative arts, professionals and amateurs are reviving and reinterpreting traditional patterns and techniques. Let's look at the language of interior decorating and design, and at compounds that consist of two or more words, like "wallpaper" and "patchwork". And note: There are no hard-and-fast rules for spelling compounds together, with a hyphen or apart — in part because English, too, is a patchwork.

Anne Hodgson

* Exhibition of British quilts at London's Victoria & Albert Museum: Quilts 1700-2010, from 20 March to 4 July 2010.