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Price 100 gp
Armor Bonus +1
This enhanced form of padded armor has internal layers specifically designed to trap arrows, bolts, darts, shuriken, thrown daggers, and other small ranged piercing weapons. When these kinds of weapons strike you, they tend to become snagged in these layers and fail to harm you. Wearing quilted cloth armor gives you DR 3/— against attacks of this kind. The special layers of the armor have no effect on other kinds of weapons.
It's made to protect against lighter thrown weapons and ammo, not literally weapons sized for small characters, and not melee weapons.
The DR applies the same against a tiny arrow as it does against small and medium arrows. Stuff larger than that would likely be up to GM fiat.
Size categories are always capitalized. The "small ranged piercing weapon" in the description is not talking about the size category of the weapon.
This enhanced form of padded armor has internal layers specifically designed to trap arrows, bolts, darts, shuriken, thrown daggers, and other small ranged piercing weapons. When these kinds of weapons strike you, they tend to become snagged in these layers and fail to harm you. Wearing quilted cloth armor gives you DR 3/— against attacks of this kind. The special layers of the armor have no effect on other kinds of weapons.
Quilted armor doesn't apply to spears (even thrown spears), picks or shortswords because the description specifies "ranged piercing weapons" and only includes "thrown daggers" as an exception; though I assume that this exception would also apply to wooden stakes, wushu darts, and similar light thrown weapons.
This armor, like most of pathfinder's rules, weren't written to accommodate different creature sizes (because the players can generally only be small and medium). The term "small" isn't a reference to the intended user size, or to the actual size of the object, but to the size of the weapon compared to the wielder. A thrown dagger intended for a medium character is actually a tiny object, and a shortspear thrown by the same character is actually a small object, yet quilted armor doesn't protect against the shortspear.
So to answer your question, the special property applies to any of the types of weapons described above, regardless of the relative sizes of the combatants or their weapon/projectile. For example: A sprite wearing quilted armor still gets DR 3/- against a dagger thrown by a storm giant, even though the dagger is actually larger than the sprite is!
Seems kind of backwards. Quilted/padded armor is fairly weak against piercing, it doesn't deflect a sharp attack unless you are talking some very specific materials and loose layers. Where padded armor rules is against blunt impact, but since we have no in-game mechanisms for standard armor converting slash, etc damage to blunt, I suppose that is pointless.
Yeah, armor effectiveness vs. specific types of attacks was an element I really loved about 2nd edition. It was phased out in 3rd edition because it confused players having to track multiple AC scores, yet the weapon damage types remained as a vestigial trait.
Now the only times when damage type is important is against skeletons, zombies, quilted armor, and characters with a few niche class features...