It’s Time to Celebrate a Successful New Year’s Resolution!

I shared the first three weeks of my Hue Year’s Resolution Project a few weeks ago. The project encourages artists to start the new year by creating five small weekly projects focusing on a single color. This project is Instagram-based and involves all types of visual artists. I shared my red, orange, and yellow creations in the first post. Today, I am sharing my micro-mini quilts featuring green, blue, and purple.

My Project Parameters

I already have my 100-day project, so I wanted to be careful in managing my time and personal expectations for this project. In other words, keep it small, fun, and creatively freeing.

My Rules

• Create 4″ square pieces suitable for matting and framing if I choose.
• Use only fabrics from my scrap bin
• Each piece must include quilting stitches

The Final Three Weeks

Green

Piece 1

My scrap bin proves that I have created a lot using green in the past few years. My first green composition includes tons of improvisationally pieced bits and pieces from previous experimentation. The improv sections are cut into rectangular pieces and quilted with straight lines to provide an organized juxtaposition to the freeform scrap piecing.

Piece 2

The color range within green is enormous, and for the second piece, I embraced mostly cool greens from pastel to deep value. The color/value gradation broken with 1/8″ wide lines of contrasting greens gives the feel of an abstracted landscape.

Piece 3

While the previous piece used straight lines to create an abstract landscape, the third micro-mini quilt creates an abstract landscape using only improvisationally pieced curves. The quilting echos the piecing lines using four colors of green 50-weight thread. The composition is quilted with lines 1/8″ apart, and portions of the quilting intersect to create an organic grid effect.

Piece 4

The fourth piece focuses on using negative space featuring small-scale piecing with 1/8″ wide inset slivers. The open spaces are activated using matchstick quilting.

Piece 5

For the final green composition, I used two sections of converging strip piecing to evoke the botanical feel of a leaf.

Blue

Piece 1

I used just one piece of dark blue and white striped fabric to create the first composition for the color blue. The narrow stripe prints made creating grids of 1/8″ squares easy. To keep the focus on the piecing, I quilted this piece using monofilament thread.

Piece 2

Scrappy blue fabrics create this on-point variation of a Log Cabin Block. The fabric in the 1/8″ wide sliver insert repeats in the corners of the block. The 1/2″ spaced grid quilting runs at a 45-degree angle to the piecing of the composition.

Piece 3

In my scrap bin, I discovered some leftover triangles trimmed from stitch-and-flip units and decided they would make the perfect focal point for this composition. I selected five colors of solid blue for the piecing and created a variation on the traditional Flock of Geese block design.

The diagonal matchstick quilting is done in three colors of 50-weight blue thread, making it feel like the geese are flying through rain.

Piece 4

For this composition, I dived into the turquoise end of the blue spectrum. Using simple strip piecing, I created a composition of horizontal stripes that evoke a horizon line over the ocean. Matchstick quilting in three colors of blue and turquoise thread melds the overall composition.

Piece 5

For the final blue composition, I broke away from the straight lines I used in my previous blue pieces in favor of circles. The circles bounce from side to side of the last circle, finishing with the smallest circle featuring a fussy cut flower. It is quilted with a diamond-shaped grid with 1/4″ spacing in one direction and 1/2″ spacing in the other.

Purple

Piece 1

I did a primarily purple improv quilt a couple of years ago, and I was delighted to find a bunch of pieced scraps from this project in my scrap bin. I combined some of these pieces for the first purple composition to create a micro mini quilt reminiscent of a crazy quilt. In keeeping with my Modern aesthetic, I quilted it with dark purple matchstick quilting at an angle echoing some of the piecing. Quilting at a contrasting angle in fuchsia thread continues a pieced segment in warm violet.

Piece 2

This composition combines pre-pieced sections of purple strips from my scrap bin with striped fabric to create this slightly off-kilter pieced grid. The quilting lines in one direction are all spaced 1/2″ apart, and the lines in the other direction are irregularly spaced to enhance the overall grid effect.

Piece 3

For the third micro-mini quilt, I turned some sections of shot cotton strip piecing into an irregular grid that implies a variation of an offset nine-patch block. The grid quilting on this piece is spaced at 1/4″, and the lines alternate between two shades of purple thread.

Piece 4

I made fusible appliqué circles and overlapped them in rows to create a tiny version of the traditional clamshell quilt design. This composition is straight line quilted in monofilament thread to maintain the viewer’s focus on the fabric composition.

Piece 5

For the final piece in the series, I pulled strips of solid purples from my scrap bin and assembled the red-violet strips in value order, interrupted by 1/8″ wide strips and one rectangle of contrasting purples. I quilted the horizontal lines using monofilament threat to allow the fabric’s color to come through. The vertical stitching is done using 50-weight cotton thread in dark purple to highlight the pieced rectangle.

The Complete Hue Year’s Resolution

Here are the 30 compositions I created in the first six weeks of 2024.

This type of project helps jumpstart a creative habit. Knowing that I could make time for this project for six weeks helps me know that I can, in fact, find 20-30 minutes a day to work on a more significant project.

Right now, that bigger project is only slightly more extensive- I’m quilting a mini quilt that has been in my UFO pile for years!