Yeah, that's a good decision to go with something not overly expensive for a first project, I think. Printed fabrics can also sometimes be a little more complicated. The pattern for the skirt I made was like "okay, if you have unicolour fabric or just dots, you can cut this in one piece, if you have a pattern on your fabric with a direction, you need to do more pieces and these additional steps to sew them together" - and I was like "lol, nope, I like polka dots, I'm gonna buy me a dotted fabric" :D
Aha, yeah, then it probably wouldn't occur to me either. I mostly buy my patterns online, since our local yarn store doesn't have a lot of patterns. I also like that I have the patterns digitally and could theoretically print them again if I cut something out wrong, that makes me less nervous :D
Do you cut out the pattern directly or do you trace it on other paper first to keep all the sizes intact on the original? I never really know what to do with the few paper patterns I have (bought some magazines with patterns included once), so I haven't used any of them yet.
Nudging is definitely a good idea sometimes! :D Which reminds me, I still have a project listed under the current projects that I scrapped, because I used the fabric for something else...
But hey, I can show what I ended up doing with it! It's a gym bag, because I got a locker at uni this semester and I found I wanted to store some sports clothing there and it would be really handy to have a bag, so I just used most of my leftover panda fabric to make it:
Link to picture
I think that was a good decision, since now I have a really cute bag instead of a skirt that might have ended up a bit too colourful and extravagant.
*scurries off to update the front page*