April Colour Inspiration

True to the saying of "April showers bring May flowers", this month's inspiration is a nod to Easter, spring weather in these parts, and my love for rainbows.

So this month's colour palette is a pastel rainbow for you to play with. Whether you're making a small Easter or Spring decoration, or a full quilt, this is perfect for a soft and fun vibe. Read on to see a selection of my own quilt patterns mocked up with these colours to kick start your creativity.

This blog post contains affiliate links. I may get a small commission if you make a purchase using one of the links. This is at no extra cost to you. Thank you for using the links.

April Colour Palette

For this pastel rainbow, I chose Kona solids in Bubblegum, Peach, Maize, Pond, Azure, and Grapemist.

I use Kona solids for my swatch photos because my local shop carries the full  range of this brand, so I've always used it, but if you prefer to use a different brand of solids, check out the app QuiltySolid (for iOS or Android) where you can match these colours both to other manufacturers of solids, as well as to threads. 

April Quilt Mockups

This was a fun palette to play with. I often do rainbow quilts, but not normally in pastel colours. These mockups remind me of baby quilts, or little girls' rooms, or maybe a picnic blanket for a spring or Easter picnic. Mind you, in our area we're not having many Easter picnics because we're usually still watching the snow melt at that time of year, but I could see this being perfect a little further south in a climate where spring starts around February and the spring flowers are in full bloom by the holiday.

First up, let me show you this Bar Code quilt. This was a bit of a surprise watching it come out. I was switching out one colour after another, starting with a mockup of the original pattern cover, and although I obviously knew what colour scheme I was going for, the soft, cozy look still took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting the colours to soften the very geometric, minimal look of the pattern quite so much.

Flocks of Colour is always a fun one to mock up, especially in various versions of rainbow. The original rainbow version uses light, medium and dark shades of the colours for each little flock of geese, but for this mockup I wanted to stick to just the soft pastels. So instead of making each flock a single colour, I made them all rainbow.

Line Dance was a bit trickier to make the rainbow look, since the fabrics are so intertwined with each other. But having the "inner loops" and "outer loops" meant I could separate my rainbow into warm and cool(ish) colours and use one set of colours for the inner loops, and one for the outer loops. I do like the fun look of this. It's soft, but still looks like it could be a party quilt, or a perfect addition to a little girl's room.

Dancing Hearts was fun to play with because the look of the quilt changes quite dramatically depending on which colour you start the gradation with. I tried out three different options, starting with this one here that follows the actual rainbow colour arrangement from red to indigo. This pattern is coming to the shop very soon! It's currently available in Make Modern magazine issue 56.

Then I thought I'd try starting one with yellow, but went from yellow to green and then added the reds after the blueish purple.

And lastly this one version that goes from yellow, via pink and purple, to end with green on the outside of the quilt.

And of course I couldn't leave Scrappy Love out of the equation, to see how this colourway would look in all scraps. I mocked up a baby size version of it because I was a bit limited in the fabric swatches I had available. So I did three hearts in each colour, but with real scraps this could look spectacular with more hearts using in-between colours, for a true rainbow gradient.

I hope you were inspired to try out pastel rainbow quilt yourself with these colours. And if you have a WIP or two to get through first, feel free to pin any of these images to your inspiration Pinterest board.