These fabric portraits began life as a photogragh. I prefer to use my own photograghs but sometimes I use others with their permission or images in public domain. In Photoshop Elements, I spend some time manipulating the image, posterize and/or use the artistic cutout tools to come up with a design that I'll use with fabric. I draw out the different shapes on paper which act as patterns for the different fabrics. Once these shapes are arranged, they are fused together. The head is then adherred to a background, then layered, and extensively machine stitched. The overall effect is on abstraction of the original image.