The winner of the whiplash theme poll was Miniature quilts - thank you to everyone who took part.

The theme is open till the end of May.

A miniature quilt, otherwise known as ‘doll quilt‘, ‘fat quarter quilt’ or more simply ‘quarter quilt‘, can be made out of just about anything - try using scraps, or just a couple of fat quarters. There is no rule about the size of these, but usually small or miniature means not as big as a cot quilt, usually they are hung on walls, framed or used for a doll house. They can be practical - perhaps used as table mats or sewn into cushion covers. You could make them extra mini and turn into a greeting cards. Any sort of quilting method is suitable too, traditional patterns, random piecing, crazy quilting or journal quilting how about hand quilting a especially beautiful fabric. For more information check out a local miniature quilt guild near you.

Some inspiration to get you started:
Thimble has used image transfer methods on a folk art inspired mini quilt :: wee wonderfuls has the most gorgeous doll quilts and other mini quilts :: angry chicken of Kingpod has beautiful mini art quilts :: buzzville scrap mini quilt

on flickr: needle felted bear with rustic mini quilt :: part of a happy quilt journal :: mini cat quilt :: doll quilt swap pool ::

Images from: angrychicken, weewonderfuls and buzzville. Top image is from weewonderfuls site from a vintage quilt magazine.

dig deeper into whipup: Week’s quilted placemats with tutorial :: memewatch on doll quilts :: fav blog posts with highlighted doll quilts by treefall ::

Rare, centuries-old books can be a wonderful source of images, patterns, illuminated letters, borders, botanical illustrations and more. The Rare Book Room :

…has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

You can zoom in on particular pages to examine images. While a number of the books are mostly text, there are treasures to be found - among those I searched were botany, children’s books and typography. You can search by category, author or source library. As you load a book - particularly the older ones - the first image of the book laid flat, cover upwards, gives you such a sense of their age, and the craft of their making, and the pleasure of being able to ‘read’ them, rare as they are.

You are also seeing the contents contextually, rather than as images abstracted from the whole (eg. Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in Alice in Wonderland).

For those enjoying paper-based and textile-based crafts, scrapbooking, altered art, artists’ trading cards, quilting, patchwork, stitching of all sorts - there are many possibilities for being inspired.

Chaucer image from here.