Choosing Colours for Spring Designs

Whether it's for spring or Easter, choosing fabric and thread colours for your ITH designs may seem easy - just go pastels, right? Well, we know it can be a little more complicated than that! But there are lots of ways to get inspired, so in this blog, we're sharing some of our favourite methods and some colour palettes to get you started.

Petals and Pastels

Let's start with the classic! Whether you want a sweet pastel Easter or a vibrant jewel toned spring, creating a unified look with these colours is all about matching tones. One of the easiest ways to do this is with something like a colour wheel or colour card! Below are some examples from our Colour Cubes to get you started, as well as a colour card I used in my Easter Friends Bunny Pocket Mug Rug. Note that this one is a little closer to a garden theme, but still maintains those soft tones that make something feel Easter. And don't be afraid to use more than one colour card!

Enchanted Meadows

Spring is all about blooming - flowers, animals, produce - and this can be a great way to create a colour story in your projects. One method that can help here is the selvage (or selvedge) on your fabrics - this little extra bit on your fabric gives a palette based on the fabric itself that is a quick reference that is perfect for finding matching scraps or new fabric in the shops. I had a little search in our fabric shelves to find some spring fabrics I would personally love to use that would make a great hero piece (which overlaps with another method below!). I have also added a fabric we chose for an alternative design for our current Block of the Month - the Woodland Wonderland Quilt - to give you an idea of how you can match fabrics to your selvage. 

From the Garden

Earthy, natural hues can look great in a more subtle spring project. A simple but sometimes overlooked method is a quick internet search! I have used Google Images here but you could pull from any online image search. In this example, I've looked at colourful carrots for inspiration around colours for our Carrot Hanger. You can see I also found the perfect colour card for it, so had to snap that as well. You could use this for any earthy, garden vibe - search root vegetables, spring fruit, Easter garden - all of these will give some great colour palette ideas! If you prefer something more tangible, you could also use old magazines or cookbooks.

Easter Eggstravaganza

And of course, there is nothing like a really bold Easter egg! In this example, I used a hero fabric as an example. I chose one that features bright, patterned eggs, and one that has bold florals as a broader spring option. With these fabrics, you can pull other colours from the design (similar to the selvage method) but the idea behind this is that you don't have to end up with the hero fabric in your design - it's all about using it as inspiration!

Colour inspiration can come from many places but we hope the ideas above, both the colour palette examples and the method to find them, can help you in your projects. Happy sewing!

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