March 2026 Quilt Colour Inspiration

Fabric swatches for March 2026

Having colours on the screen as inspiration is one thing, but as quilters we need to be able to find them in fabric collections as well. I'm using the QuiltySolid app to put together fabric collections of some common solids brands.

• Robert Kaufman Kona Cotton: Gold, Papaya, Ultra Marine, Surf, Jamaica
• Northcott Colorworks: Curry, Daffodil, Malachite, Sapphire, Lagoon
• Moda Bella Solids: Caramel, Marigold, Dark Teal, Imperial Blue, Bright Turquoise
  
• Andover Fabrics Century Solids: Ginger, Papaya, Isle, Sapphire, Turqoise
• HEX codes, to look up other brands: #a05511, #fd9815, #057979, #0060a5, #00c6f7

Always check these in person, though. The app gives the closest colours by hue, saturation, and value, to the HEX code entered, but they may not look quite right together in person. Substituting a different shade for one of the fabrics might work better.

This was the challenge this month, finding ways to use these colours without adding too many others in to make them work. I did have to add background, and sometimes an additional colour, but I stuck pretty close to what I had given myself.

The first pattern is Dancing Hearts, which needed an extra yellow to make the six colours for the hearts, plus a background. I tried a few different "gradients" for the hearts, because this quilt really does work best with a gradient, and settled on this one that starts with light blue at the top of the hearts and ends with yellow at the bottom. And while it worked with a white background and looked quite fresh, the black makes these colours pop in a way I didn't expect, so that was a nice side effect.

Next up I tried Bar Code, and loved how that turned out. It needed an extra colour as well, but here I added a second, slightly darker brown. The blue/turquoise set against the yellow/brown set really works nicely here. I like how it almost makes cool and warm blocks. And depending on which colour you pick for the binding, it either makes it look like a blue quilt with some brown, or a brown quilt with some blue.

Next up is a quilt I haven't used in mockups in a long time. This one is Dayglow, and was in Love Patchwork & Quilting issue 86. It was featured in the magazine as a gradient quilt as well, but I had done some mockups with this earlier with other colourings, so I tried one of them out with this colour scheme. I have to say I quite like it, despite it not being my usual wheelhouse of colours at all. It has a bit of a retro vibe, and I think it would make a pretty cool quilt for a teen boy.

And lastly, I tried a few versions of Staccato. Since this one has a lot of negative space, the background colour really makes the difference here. 

The first option has a yellow background, which makes it feel all warm and sunny, especially because the blues and teal are kept to the center of the quilt where they overall have less of an impact. 

For the second one, I swapped the background out to a light greyish blue, and it changes the look of the quilt already, even though the colouring of the squares and the binding remained the same. 

And for the third version, I also swapped the squares around, and added blue binding, so now it's definitely a blue and cool quilt, with only a little bit of the warm yellow and brown in the center. 

What do you think, will you try out this colour combination on one of your next quilts? Or maybe it has given you an idea for a combination that you want to try out. And if you're not quite ready to commit to it, you can always pin any of the images here to your own inspiration board.