In 1856 Adeline Harris, a 17-year-old from Rhode Island, set out to make a quilt from celebrity signatures. Instead of travelling, she mailed small white silk diamonds to famous people and asked them to sign and return them. She received 360 signed pieces, including ones from Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander von Humboldt and Abraham Lincoln. She stitched the diamonds into a tumbling-block pattern that looks three-dimensional, surrounded by colored silk. Conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art later counted 1,840 silk pieces in the quilt.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.