It's true that giving a piece of fabric a second life only keeps it out of the landfill for so long. The real environmental and social benefits of not purchasing new materials come from the fact that when you don't by new materials, no new materials will be manufactured to replace them on the open market. At the end of the day, less materials produced means less in the landfills.

I also have personal aversions to buying new things and throwing things away that is probably more a force of habit. I grew up as the second of seven, and people must have known that it was hard to clothe that many kids. We would often come home and find anonymous garbage bags full of clothing on the porch. There was a little brawl on the living room floor over anything that was wearable, and then I would pack up the rest in the shredded remains of the garbage bag and haul it upstairs to my room.

I spent a lot of time altering the clothes - one reason was to make them fit but another reason was to disguise the fact that I was possibly wearing my friends' dads' old shirts and their mothers' old dresses to school. I was not very good at what I did, but I got creative with it. There was a strawberry shortcake outfit, a Christmas tree outfit... My friends said it hurt to look at me and my sister threatened to burn my clothes. I had to hide them in the neighbor's basement. Keep in mind that this was the early 90's, when drab was in and mix-and-match was unheard of.

I never developed a taste for new clothes. They smell weird, for one thing. It takes a while to make them comfortable. Bags and boxes of scraps of fabric and clothing have been following me around and filling up my closets for years but they didn't have a dedicated purpose until I discovered cloth pads. I used to say that I would take up quilting some day, but I think this is a lot more fun.