May 2026 Quilt Colour Inspiration

Fabric swatches for May 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: Chinese Red, Poppy, Melon, Bellini, Black
• Northcott Colorworks: Crimson, Candy Apple, Coral, Rose Petal, Black
• Moda Bella Solids: Kansas Red, Christmas Red, Strawberry, Pink, Silky Soft Black
  
• Andover: Redwood, Guava Punch, Dawn, Pink Lemonade, Black
• HEX codes, to look up other brands: #8c2426, #e9262c, #f36e69, #f9afa8, #09080c

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.

Because this is a gradient, I found myself going back to familiar patterns like Dancing Hearts, Bar Code, and Flocks of Colour, as these all work really well with gradients.

To start off, let's have a look at some Bar Code options. This was the first quilt that popped into my mind when I saw this colour scheme, so it was the first one I tried out. And there are so many ways to arrange these colours, I had to limit myself to three for this blog post.

First up, just a gradient using black as the darkest colour, and putting it on a medium grey background. I played with a few greys and liked this one best. Paler greys made the pale pink disappear, and darker ones competed with the black stripe.

Next, I had to try out black as the background, and I love how that makes the pinks glow, but not in a "little girl" kind of way. I did add some more colours into the gradient as this needs 6 colours for the stripes. I could totally see this in quilt in a college dorm :-)

I had one more Bar Code idea before we'll move on to other patterns, and that's using black as an accent. So I used the same pink gradients as a above, but put it on a white background and just added in some black stripes here and there, not as part of the gradient but just sprinkled throughout. And I changed the binding to black to tie it all together. I black and white stripe would look fabulous here, too.

My next pattern to play with was Dancing Hearts, another sure bet when using gradients. For this one, I went straight to a pink gradient on a black background, and I love how it looks. I've always liked this quilt with dark backgrounds, even though my original is pink on white, but there's something about the hearts really standing out against a dark background. 

I didn't want you to miss out on seeing this on a white background, though, so here it is. It has a very different feel, despite using all the same colours.

 

For Flocks of Colour I kept to the white background as well, and added the black to the gradient. Despite using the same colours and gradient arrangement as the Dancing Hearts, this quilt looks softer thanks to having more negative space. 

And lastly, I wanted to see what Ripple & Swirl would look like in this kind of a colour scheme. This is a pattern that is normally done scrappy in two colours, which means that by default you end up with a gradient of a sort in both thanks to having many different fabrics of the same or similar colour. For this mockup, I first thought I'd use various shades of dark grey and black for the second colour, but wasn't happy with how that turned out, so I switched it to all black for a bit of a different look.

What do you think, would you use this or a similar colour scheme in a future quilt?