These four photos that I took in the Badlands of Wyoming were the basic inspiration for this small quilt.

I start with a piece of cotton batting carefully smoothed over some printed backing fabric of the same size.

With this fabric collage technique I work like a painter, putting in a wash for the sky as my first step. My wash is actually a piece of fabric. The sky isn’t too important in this piece, so I just left it alone without any additions of other fabrics.

Next comes the distant background. Everything is collaged on a flat surface, with no glue or pins. I cut the pieces freehand and arrange them to suit me. Pieces can be moved around, cut smaller or made bigger as necessary.

Here I have worked partway into the middle ground, continuing to layer freehand-cut fabrics and novelty trims as I work my way down.I don’t worry about anything looking perfect…this is a pretty loose impression.

Now I have a basic background color laid in for the foreground.

I’ve cut little snippets of a bunch of sage green fabrics to sprinkle around for sagebrush, with some black threads and novelty trims for the stems and branches. Still no pins or glue. I've also created a line of worn-out fenceposts, each one from a different fabric to give the impression of the weathering process.

Here there are more foreground details, all done very loosely and quickly, with snippets of fabric and novelty trims. 

Now the quilt has a layer of transparent tulle over it, which was pinned very densely with small straight pins. I then freehand machine quilted through all of the layers to accentuate the details of the sky, rocks and bushes. I added a beige border after completing the quilting and trimming the piece, and then quilted the border.

The piece is almost done here. Once the border was quilted, I added some foreground fenceposts spilling out of the frame to accentuate the perspective of the fence line disappearing into the distance. When that was done I trimmed the quilt again and added a binding.