In April of 1930, the women's magazine Zhenskii zhurnal (Women's Journal) offered its resourceful reader instructions on how to make a ‘panneau’, or wall decoration. (Fig. 6.1) This sumptuous object was to be achieved by appliqué design on plain fabric, ‘basic cotton, hessian or canvas’. The reader of Zhenskii zhurnal—like that of other women's magazines of the time such as Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and Iskusstvo odevat'sia (The Art of Dressing)—was, it is to be presumed, skilled in appliqué, for articles introducing and developing the technique and applying it to the production of all manner of useful household objects were common in editions of such magazines from the mid-1920s on.

Appliqué was just one aspect of the category known as rukodelie (literally, a thing made with one's hands), which appeared increasingly prominently in the female press. From 1926 until the early 1930s, each issue of Zhenskii zhurnal contained a one-page section with the heading ‘Rukodelie’ and instructions on how to make objects for the home. In 1930, the heading was changed to the more portentous ‘Remeslo i prikladnoe iskusstvo’ (Craft and Applied Arts), but the content remained essentially unchanged.