Jingle all the way

I'm feeling on top of the world - there is still two weeks until Christmas and I have another idea for a gift.  My daughter, Sarah,  lives in L.A. and she comes home for Christmas.  She loves plants and one of her favorites is cactus.
For a few years I've wanted to make a fabric collage of a flowering cactus.  Who better to make this for but Sarah.  With only two weeks until Christmas I don't know if I can pull this off, but if I can't I already have her presents - this is just a bonus.   I can always give it to her later as a birthday present.
I got busy drawing out a cactus and adding some flowers, traced the basic outline in black marker and placed muslin over the top to start building up my fabric colors.
Of course I needed more fabric.  For a collage I prefer batik fabric because it doesn't ravel as easy.  Besides batiks have rich colors - perfect.  I headed back up to the quilt shop and found fabrics that  would work and I began snipping and gluing.
This is only the second collage I've made, but it went together great.  And of course it sort of grew from my original drawing as I worked on it - more flowers and cactus.

After one week I had it done and ready to quilt.  Here is my final masterpiece.

I added tied embroidery floss to the cactus to look like the thorns.  The finished size is 20" by 30"