Last weekend, Tracy came to visit and, among other things, we had to make time to shop for some upcoming projects. I decided I need to recover the glider for the new baby’s room and that involved shopping for acceptable fabric. We found some cute green ticking that should go great in the room and still be classy when not used for little babies!

While at the designer fabric store we came across some fabric sample books that were no longer being used. The styles were probably discontinued, updated, or otherwise no longer needed.

I asked about the price with my big baby belly poking out and the sales lady said “$1.” Needless to say, we stocked up. We ended up with four but that will last us through many fun projects!

To prep the fabric for said projects, we had to first remove the fabric from the binder (Tracy had fun ripping them apart!)

Then we removed the sticky labels from the back of each one. For that task, we decided on soaking in lukewarm water:

Once they were wet enough, we were able to pull the labels off fairly cleanly. We were also multi-tasking by adding some laundry soap and cleaning the pieces of fabric.

After we felt like they were clean and no longer sticky, we hung them on a drying rack to dry:

Now what are we doing with these fabric samples? Well, we have a few ideas up our sleeves. One, I want to make fabric baby blocks. The different textures will make it look fun and is great for young kids. (I’ve actually already made one so I’ll post that soon!) We’re also thinking about doing some taggie fabric books as well. Any more ideas for uses for this fabric??? We’d love to hear them!