Another just for fun- buying fabric
 

Ok Ill stop with the daft questions after this one I promise! I just want to know how people go about making decisions about the fabric they buy... do folks buy based on a theme/colour or are they like me where a bag of random remnant sends them into paroxysms of happiness? (seriously the less I know about the scraps the better, its like a big old present to myself!)

The reason I ask is I have just bought a 15kg bag of cotton remnants (the needs to be hidden from teh OH) and just love sorting them by colour/theme and then arranging them how I think they would best go... then rearranging them again...

I buy what strikes me at the time and also for a project I am making.. Sometimes I wonder" Why on earth did I buy that" them someone gets a "gift". I love fabric!

Sometimes I have something specific in mind and I buy exactly what I need. But many times, I am drawn to a pretty piece of fabric that I must have! Then I have to buy accompanying pieces as well...

Often it is the price. Right now I am on a very tight fabric spending budget. But yesterday, I stopped at a not so local QS to buy some bobbins for my new machine and the store was having a 50% off every bolt sale. I wanted to go absolutely crazy because their fabric was gorgeous--but limited myself to one piece of beautiful border print for a runner. Oh how I want to sell the oldest grandkid and go back--but I don't think the DD would approve!!

I have a huge stash so now I buy fabric to fill in the gaps when I start a new quilt. I mostly buy pre cuts these days. They are easier to store and save me lots of time. I use a Go die cut machine for most of my cutting and the precuts fit almost all the dies.

First of all. Your questions are not daft and have sparked fun and interesting discussion, so don't stop.
I am in the buy-what-appeals-to-me camp. Sometimes with fabrics that go along and sometimes not. I find resisting fabric difficult although I am trying to use up my huge stash before I buy much more.
But I am also the queen of remnants. They are considerably cheaper than yardage and I like scrappy quilts. Or I gather a number of remnants over time that coordinate and make a non-scrappy quilt.

If the fabric jumps out at me as I walk past it, its mine. If I'm online and I see a good sale on fabric at my favorite online shops, I buy 2yds or more depending on if I think I can use it a lot such as blender fabrics and whites/beiges then I buy 5 yds or a bolt. If I find a blender fabric collection I usually buy some of each color. Have lots of Collecting Threads blender collections. I made a complete quilt using just blender scraps and it came out beautiful. I quilted it with an E2E pattern and it glowed..........in my opinion for whatever that's worth. I kept this quilt for my own, its only a lap size anyway.

I LOVE finding bags of cotton fabric scraps at garage sales!

At retail stores, I rarely buy more than a yard of fabric unless it's for a specific project, I just love scrappy - the more the merrier!

I'm with Macybaby, I love me a scrappy quilt! My guild has a sale every year where members donate fabric they are through with and the guild sells it for $2/lb - they get everything from nearly full bolts down to scraps the size of my palm. I LOVE the scraps - I do crazy quilts too, so almost any size or shape of fabric will work for me, and getting a hold of other people's scraps adds so much variety to my quilts! And at $2 a pound, that's practically free. (Or so I tell myself, LOL)

I buy fabric for a lot of reasons. Because I like it, because I need it, because it coordinates with something I already have, because it feels nice, because it's super cheap and not horrible...any of those reasons can make me bring fabric home. And then there's fabric I am given - now that I've been quilting awhile people know I will take fabric. I have a handful of garment sewer friends who save their cotton scraps for me, and twice now coworkers have had a sewing relative pass away and given me access to their fabric horde. (Both were garment sewers though, which is probably a good thing as it made me take very little!)