The way I buy fabric has changed in the last year. When I first started sewing, I concentrated on patchwork and tended to buy smaller lengths of fabrics, with one yard being my average buy. This meant that I was able to buy lots of different prints, which in turn meant that I kept up to date with all the new collections and designers out there.
These days because I mainly make childrens clothes, I tend to buy an awful lot more yardage, so that I have enough of one print to make, for example, one blouse in 6 sizes.
As well as the quantity changing, my tastes have changed. Where I used to love all the different heavily patterned fabrics out there, I now tend to be drawn towards much more basic prints. With lots of less identifiable checks, spots and solids.
The downside to this though is that because I no longer buy lots of different prints I'm a lot less in touch with what's out there. Although of course there will always be prints out there that I just can't resist.
In this case it's the Quilt Block collection by Ellen Lucket Baker, which is just stunning, especially the hexagon prints. But I still only bought a yard of this, whereas I bought 4 yards each of the checks, because the checks are much more useful for dressmaking and they are fair less identifiable as someone elses print, and much easier to turn in to a design that is identifiable as mine.
