Buying Fabric (No Advertising)

Dear users and authors,
what do you look for when buying fabric?

Please do not post links to online stores—thank you.

For me, these are usually impulse buys! If a little piece of fabric “catches my eye” at the fabric store, I just have to have it! Most of the time, I don’t even know yet what I want to sew with it. That can be a problem sometimes, though, because I might end up with too little fabric for a specific project. But my creativity usually saves the day—I just mix and match and improvise ;-) Another problem is that my fabric stash—just like my yarn stash—keeps getting bigger, and my day would actually have to be 48 hours long to work through it all......
For beginner sewers, this approach isn’t necessarily recommended, of course; it definitely makes sense to first pick out a project and a sewing pattern, and then specifically look for the right fabric for it!