Ugly Kathy and Beautiful Brad

Hi everyone, I made "Ugly Kathy" as a response to a group of challenges I was involved in. I thought it turned out really well though I will say people either like it or hate it......I thought I would explain how I made it.....

First I picked out a photo of myself.....then it was time to go to Kinko's and enlarge it (alot). After that was done, I simplified the image.......

Then came the fun part.......gathering all of my ugly swap fabrics and adding even more ugly fabrics. I then cut out the fabrics into 9 inch squares. One square was equal to one block in the quilt.

Then I cut fusible web into 8 1/2 inch squares and traced the image onto each square of fusible. Once that was done, I fused the web to the wrong side of each fabric square and cut it apart on the lines. So when I was done I had a piles of eyes, mouths, ears, hair, etc

Then I picked out different fabrics from each parts pile, put together the face like a jigsaw puzzle and fused it all down onto muslin squares. Then I satin stitched around everything to keep it in place.

I really like how it turned out......the quilt was juried into Quilt Odyssey. I went to see it at the show and my then 6 year old son was with me. A lady at the show asked him if I was going to make his picture into a quilt. He looked at her very seriously and said "Yes, but it won't be called Ugly Brad". Ha, ha....that really made me laugh.

I made a quilt called "Beautiful Brad" using all solids from this picture.

I blew this up alot on the copier too and simplified it.....

It was very different to work with the solids.......and I don't have a photo to show you of the quilt. It is in an exhibit right now......so sorry about that. When I was blowing up this image, I played around with the copier and this picture....

Brad had just lost his two front teeth and I wanted to capture the moment. I copied and blew up the image. I ended up with lots of copies of various parts of his face. And I thought they looked very interesting mixed together so I save them for the future......well the future has arrived and I am ready to do "Purple Brad".

Hoping to get started with laying out the copies later this week and post some photos.....

kathy