Craft Code Switching III

A look at quilt-making, and at textile crafts inspiring each other.

This is the third and final part of our Craft Code Switching series. If you haven’t read the first two parts you can find them here and here. You don’t have to read them to make sense of this post, but it might be worth going back and taking a look if you have time!

Welcome back to Craft Code Switching! In the first part of this series, we talked about the idea that if we are multicraftual we can code switch between different crafts, choosing the right one for the job depending on each craft’s own strengths and best applications, much in the same way as someone might switch between different languages or registers depending on the situation or the person they are communicating with. In the second part, we talked about the structures of knitting and crochet; their similarities and differences, and what skills and techniques can be used for both of them. Now we will be applying a similar lens to quilt-making, and then zooming back out to look at all three crafts again. The main question I want to ask is what unites all of them, and how can we take lessons and inspiration from one craft and apply them to another.

But first, quilts! Quilt-making is very different from the yarn-based crafts we’ve looked at so far, for one very obvious reason: it lacks yarn. As I said previously, when you knit or crochet something you are creating the fabric from scratch as you go, using yarn, whereas when you make a quilt you are using pre-made fabrics.