If you’re keen to match the colours within your quilts, equilter has for a long time given you fairly specific colour names with each fabric, so you can search on turquoise or aquamarine, rose or blossom pink, not just blue or pink, and there is a design board view. A number of other online retailers have variations on these possibilities.

A new site offering colour and design possibilities is fabricmatcher.com. You can pick a colour from a generous grid of colour options (with hex colour codes given as well) and see which fabrics match (the fabric partner is Hancocks of Paducah). You can upload a picture and see which fabrics resemble its patterning. The site also offers patterns and more.

If you can suggest other sites with colour guidance for quilters, by all means add them in the comments.

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.

Moo card lamp by Joy

Many of you would have probably already discovered moo cards, printed from your online photostream from sources such as Flickr.

There are lots of craft possibilities for these cards (or little cards you might print yourself), from the lampshade above (found at ikea hacker) to Mel’s moo-gnet tutorial here.

Moo-gnet tutorial

If you just want to carry and savour your cards, Pam has some printable mooboxes here. You could either print and use them as is, or they’d give you a template for your own adventures in cloth, paper, whatever (?plastic canvas?!). There’s a moo card Flickr group too – I rather liked moo-cards-as-prayer-flags in this photo by LunaSol.

Please do share any other moo card craft ideas you’ve done yourself, or links you’ve found, in the comments.

The Royal Easter Show is the biggest agricultural show in Sydney and the ‘pinnacle’ agricultural show in the state of NSW, encompassing agriculture, entertainment, arts and crafts and much more. It draws nearly a million visitors each Easter.

The District Exhibits are one of the wonders of the show, enormous displays of fresh produce, each assembled by a region of eastern Australia. They are very much the craft of hands, assembled in a hectic world and involving significant collaboration by folk in each region. It takes months of planning to devise a theme and find the produce (which has to come from that region). (I should have counted, but there are about six regions in total). As you can see, installation involves significant time, every apple set just so, every element playing its part.

Everything you see – houses, fields, butterflies, flowers – is made from fresh produce (fruit, vegetables, seeds, wool and more), sometimes reimagined in the most remarkable ways.

There’s tremendous ingenuity, as, in this display for instance, raw ingredients become butterflies, a pumpkin becomes a snail shell and eggs form its trail. They are judged on the quality of the produce (not easy in the last few years due to drought) and the artistic qualities of the displays.

With each display are people from the volunteer group involved in making it, usually selling examples of their region’s produce – a bowl of fresh watermelon or pineapple, cheese and biscuits, apples, bananas – the proceeds of which will go towards the cost of next year’s display.

There’s a Quicktime 360 degree view of the exhibits in 2004 here.

There were some other engaging examples of craft at the Show, including children’s craft and recycled craft, but rather than pack them in here I’ll post about them soonish.

If your area has a show with hand-made craft on display, particularly more unusual examples (I wonder if any shows now feature floral carpets?) and you have a link with pictures for others to enjoy, please share in the comments.

(Floral carpets were done by arranging flowers – usually just the heads – and leaves into patterns on a tray, and were a class at some Australian country shows last century. Think of how shells are patterned on shell-covered boxes, and they were something like that, a mosaic of flowers).

All photos above were taken by this post’s author.

Smaller than an ATC and with wonderful wearable possibilities, fabric charms are worth exploring. The photo above is from this blog and if you look at this photoset from Ruth Rae you can see the charms in detail. Her work is due to be featured in the May/June issue of ClothPaperScissors.

You’ll find a tutorial here from Sue Bleiweiss and the results of an Australian swap here.

Participants in the Just Simply Charming swap show their work and some processes here.

If whiplash isn’t enough and you need to find more…sometimes a challenge can be just the creative inspiration you need to try something new, or just try something. There are lots of them all over the internet – here are a few. They also offer the opportunity to see how others have responded to the same challenge, as most have galleries. You’re not tied as with a swap, but can participate or not according to your own whim and schedule. You may well know some of these – so please add others in the comments:

Photo Friday (weekly)

Illustration Friday(weekly)

Tie one on (aprons) (bimonthly)

Weekly challenges at Craftster

Use what you have month (monthly)

Ali Edwards’ AEzine contains a weekly challenge

Two Peas in a Bucket weekly scrapbooking challenge

Please do suggest other current worthwhile craft challenges you know and recommend in the comments. Maybe you’ve set up a great challenge with crafting friends, and could tell us about it?

threadbanger: describing itself as “the first network for people who make their own fashion”, this quirky site includes weekly shows and a blog. Ep. 5 of Threadheads includes ideas for finding good stuff at Goodwill (op shops/Oxfam), while the associated blog entry points to worthwhile vintage sources.

Thanks for the heads-up, Kirsty/Twolimeleaves.

Natural dyes for Easter eggs (and wool!)

kath_red did a comprehensive post on Easter crafts last year.

To add a few more ideas:

At AllFiberArts, natural dyes for Easter eggs using red cabbage and turmeric.

Other dyeing techniques using such things as bubble wrap and tissue paper at FamilyFun.

Stephanie at yarn harlot had some fun with wax techniques over the new year period – here’s the result (or start reading a few days earlier to see the process) (she decided not to become the egg harlot – yarn isn’t so breakable, for starters…).

If you want a few more permanent eggs around, find a good quality wool skirt in a second-hand/op-shop/Goodwill/Oxfam/whatever they’re called in your neck of the woods. Cut out two egg shapes, sew, turn, stuff and sew up, then decorate with beads, embroidery, whatever takes your fancy. (You could, of course, buy new wool felt instead). Think of the cone trees so many folk made last Christmas, and try an eggery tack. Simple shapes such as these give plenty of room for your imagination and individuality. A bowl of these on the coffee table…it’s a thought.

Denim ball gown by Ingrid Steinmetz

Meroogal is a Victorian home in the south coast town of Nowra, NSW, Australia (south of Sydney). It’s now a museum – particularly interesting because it was inhabited over many decades by women of one family, and so you can see a fascinating variety of domestic detail and learn about the minutiae of their lives.

The Meroogal women’s arts prize is a regional non-acquisitive competition and exhibition across the fields of visual arts, crafts and design. Diverse and original use of media is a signature of the exhibition, which encourages the practise of traditional women’s arts and crafts in a contemporary context. The theme of the prize, which varies each year, establishes a direct connection to Meroogal and the women who lived there, as well as acting as a springboard for artistic imagination. The theme for 2006 is Reduce, recycle & renew at Meroogal (Quote from here).

Entry is limited to surrounding districts, but the galleries of entries from several years provide plenty of inspiration and imagination, whether Meroogal is hours or half a world away from where you live. If you click on a particular entry you will find information from the artist about the work.

Red Blankets are Warmer by Lisa Johnson

Image from the Electronic Swatchbook

To quote from the Electronic Swatchbook home page:

Swatches or small samples of fabric have been collected and compiled in the form of swatchbooks for at least 300 years. The Powerhouse Museum has several volumes containing thousands of bright, unfaded samples of fashionable fabric designs, braids and laces ranging from the 1830s to the 1920s.

YOu can zoom in on individual images, email them, randomise them – lots of possibilities, including downloading (and they’re big, detailed files that can be 8mb in size). Check the legals info to see if they’re public domain in your country (they are in Australia – the Powerhouse Museum is in Sydney), or just browse and enjoy.