Life lessons.

Meet "Mumms the Word" by Debbie Mumm for SSI. It's a nice floral motif with butterflies, and the design seems like a nod to traditional and folk arts, so I liked it. Well, no. I loved it in the blue colorway. However, the quilt shop I found it at only had the blue left as part of a quilt kit bundle, and a limited amount of the off white as well.
The shop was closing, and I hadn't seen this fabric anywhere else, and I wanted it. Because the shop was closing, it was all deeply discounted as well, which made it an easier sell. So, I bought the quilt kit and decided to pick up the end yardage of the off white. After all, it was the motif I loved, right?
When I got home I discovered, after a few days, that I was not in love with my purchase. I really loved the blue the best, and there was only a scant half yard of it. Also, I discovered that the other fabrics in the quilt kit had been folded and in the "kit" longer than others, and that they'd been set in the sun or had something spill on them, so that near one set of creases, there was a great deal of fading/discoloration.
Great.
So, it sat in my stash. Every now and again I'd get it out and try to decide what to do with it, but I never did anything. Finally, today I'm doing something awesome with it all, some six years later. However, when I was going through my stash with my mother, she pointed out a design flaw in the cream fabric. Whereas the mottled background on the blue, with it's regular hazy circles of darker blue, lends depth to the design, the slightly yellow regular dots on the cream convinced my mother that it was dirty.
Ouch.
So, here are my life lessons:
If you love it, buy at least a yard.
If you don't love it, don't buy it.
If at all possible, inspect fabric in kits.
Rush decisions aren't your friend.
Think twice about mottled cream, because it'll just irritate you when someone thinks it's dirty.

Have you learned any important life lessons from errant fabric shopping? Please let me know, and if you have any suggestions for projects with the things you just don't love, I'd be grateful, because I'm working on tearing through some of this so I can better focus on the "good" stash decisions.