The girls and I had a clothes swap on Friday. These are fantastic events - held, on average, twice a year, when we swap our clothes over for the change of season.

As you pull all your last-winter or last-spring clothes out of their storage packs and try them on, you find that some things no longer fit - you've gained weight or lost weight, or you're just fed-up with the thing and fancy a change.

As age, with every passing month, changes my body yet again - my colouring, my shape, my proportions - dressing becomes like chasing a Slinky down the stairs and a 'bourse' gives me the opportunity to obtain some 'new' stuff without spending a cent. It's also a great way to try new looks without risk - if they don't work, you just redonate them.

There were about 15 of us on this occasion and it always strikes me when we have a bourse how nice women are - we pick things out for one another, say: "No, you first," a lot, even as we pointy-elbow our way through the huge pile of cast-offs and stuff cheese nibbles and wine down our necks.

There must have been 20 bin-liners of clothes this time, along with books and ornaments, kitchen equipment etc, and at the end of the evening, I was left with just one bag of clothes to take to the Emmaus charity, along with a few ornaments. Two boxes of books went to a cancer charity and every other single thing was taken.

As more and more of these events have been held over the years, I see items coming around again. On Friday, it was my lovely old blue Shetland Fairisle gilet, which I donated a few years ago, has evidently been worn by someone else and has now been taken by my friend C for this winter. A real case of what goes around comes around.

It was the usual fun - 10 of us this time (the more the merrier, generally) and everybody, as usual, brought an astounding number of bags of used/new/too small/too big/wrong shape clothing to swap. After aperos, we all delved in, and - says the DH - the volume increased to remarkable levels.

It is nice to pick up 'new' stuff free of charge, but also nice to see once-favourite clothes going around again. My old straw-coloured chenille waistcoat with abalone buttons, which I gave to M, has been redonated by her after a couple of years' wear and was picked up by another friend. Ditto my old sage-green fine-knit cardigan, which I loved beyond measure but which had sleeves for someone with chimp arms and which I never wore. M has worn that too for a couple of seasons and now it's time to move it through her wardrobe and on to someone else. 

My personal haul was very classic this time: a beautiful blue linen skirt from a friend who has lost weight, four pairs of black linen pants - just the sort of thing I live in, in summer - along with a bunch of long-sleeve crewneck tees, most of them unworn. Thus do we French rural types benefit from the buy-it-now, try-it-on-later habits of spendthrift Brits.

People also brought books, shoes and the odd household item (sometimes it's masses of electrical goods, or crockery) and at the end of the evening, I asked everyone to take one charity bag. This goes to Emmaus - about our only charity locally, which sells items to help the homeless, and also picks up furniture for the newly homed. Other than that, these used clothes will all go in the recycling bin at the supermarket, Le Relais, where they are sorted for the third world, but in fact mostly go to make eco-friendly roof insulation.

This morning, however, as I sorted out the charity stuff from the shredding stuff and put my new stash away, I felt a firming of purpose and decided to throw away yet more clothes, but using a different criterion. Does this, I asked myself, make me feel good about myself when I put it on? I do have a horrible habit of keeping knackered old crap on the premise that it'll DO.

So this morning, into the recycling bag went a great many washed-out dingy t-shirts, because, as I said to my friend N, how many gardening outfits does a girl really need? I've kept a few of my very longest t-shirts for doing dirty work, but seriously, it's time to admit defeat on the others, stiffened and browned by our earthy well water, especially as I have so many perfectly usable and much nicer tee shirts to wear.

So what with that, and my new template-folding system, my cupboards are now feeling satisfyingly empty, and I am looking round for other stuff to throw away. 

I found a nice little article on wardrobe decluttering the other day, so thought I'd share it with you.

It's about what to do with your cast-offs - that big pile of rejects that you assemble at the end of a long day of riffling through your wardrobe and throwing out. 

There are, of course, several different reasons that you might want to throw something out, but you can take an eco-friendly approach to what to do about it. 

If your clothes don't fit because they're too small, and you're really not going to lose the weight, then think about selling them on Ebay, swapping them with your friends or simply giving them away. Care2connect gives a list of organisations that would be grateful for your cast-offs and although these don't apply to European readers, we can usually head for the charity shop or an Emmaus drop-off point. I get together with my girlfriends about once a quarter to swap clothes and those that no-one wants are taken to Emmaus, where they're given to poor local families. 

If your clothes don't fit because they're too large, then consider having the good ones altered and discard the rest as above. Particularly if you've lost weight, don't keep overlarge clothes hanging around the house - it's way too much temptation. 

2 - it's out of date.

It depends on how out of date and in what way, but there might be a possibility of salvage here. If a piece is of good quality or a favourite but the collar or shoulders are wrong, it can be worth having it retailored to a more contemporary style. Only do this, however, if the item's really worth it - a good wool suit, say, or a coat - because otherwise it's usually more cost-effective to get rid of it and buy a new one. Have the job done professionally - resetting a shoulder, for instance, is a job well out of the skills range of the average home sewer.

3 - you're bored with it.

Sometimes you do get sick of seeing the same old thing and it can be hard to get excited about an item you've worn a thousand times. Here is where it's handy if you're handy - if you can find some way of altering a garment yourself. My favourite thing is dyeing. Back in the days when I was an impoverished student, I used to buy all manner of charity-shop clothes in awful colours and have them dyed black at Sketchley's dry cleaners. I'd then add new trims and buttons and voila - completely different.

Although it's more difficult to get clothes professionally dyed these days, you can still do lightweight items yourself in the washing machine. I use Dylon dye, at twice the strength recommended, and my towels, sofa covers and sheets also all get revamped every so often, along with jeans and t-shirts. For a more complicated approach, I use the shibori dye technique, but I'll leave a description of that for another time.

Adding new trim or a fake-fur collar or new buttons to a cardigan or jacket can completely change its appearance if the basic garment is sound - you can find these in notions departments. And while you're in town, why not head for the library and see if you can find one of those books about revamping your clothes that were all the rage in the 1980s? Some of the ideas seem laughable now, but others, such as leather elbow patches, still work. I'm willing to place a bet that patching your jeans with brightly coloured iron-ons as we all did in the 70s will once again become the rage in the economic downturn.

4 - it's past its best.

If that means that it's frankly shabby but you like it, consider giving it one pass through the dyebath - a good dye job can cover a lot of fading and give you an extra year's wear on a garment. If it really is too knackered, then either pension it off for rough work, give it away or think about recycling it in some way. In this house, all our dusters and floor clothes are made from old pyjamas and t-shirts, while old jumpers get felted in the machine and cut out for patchwork (or given to my friend M to make bags with). Even if you don't do craft yourself, you may find a local craft group will be grateful for your old fabrics, especially anything in lightweight cotton, which quilters love to work with. 

I saw a wonderful documentary on TV last night. It was about Michael Reynolds, and entitled Garbage Warrior.

Reynolds is my sort of bloke. Resolutely alternative, mad as a hatter and highly visionary, for 30 years he's been building self-sustainable communities in the extreme climate of New Mexico's desert, where winter temperatures can fall to 30 below freezing. 

Called Earthships, the kind of monniker that is hardly going to endear him to the 'straights', these houses use passive solar for heating, and are constructed around a central greenhouse that enables a family to be almost entirely self-sufficient for water, heat, power and food. The walls are remarkable - mainly constructed from recycled plastic and glass bottles set into cement (resulting in igloo-like structures of stained glass beauty), or used tyres packed hard with earth to create thermal mass.

Thermal mass is something you become familiar with when you live in a stone house like mine, incidentally. With their granite walls 2ft thick, these houses have to be warmed up in winter until the heat sinks into the stones and radiates back out again, but once warm, they retain their heat brilliantly and don't need much topping up. It's something that the holiday-home owners rarely understand: because they're never here long enough to warm the houses up, they imagine that for the rest of us, they are cold to live in during winter. 

Anyway, back to Reynolds.

Establishing self-sufficient communities is the kind of thing that is hardly likely to please the powers that be, who would rather have us all firmly over a barrel where utilities are concerned (what do we exist for, if not to make money for the corporates?), and for around seven years, the authorities succeeded in depriving him of his licence and shutting him down.

But he was saved by the tsunami. Desperate for new ideas about building, architects in the Amdamman Islands called on him and his crew to help them rebuild after losing almost all their housing and half their population to the tidal wave.

Unhampered by red tape and over-regulation, he and his men showed the island communities how to build their houses from what they had lying around, and as usual with non-western communities, the hard labour of the local populace was shaming. We sometimes forget that most of the manual labour in the world is done by women and that 80 per cent of the world's farmers are women, but I was reminded of it watching these frail-looking females in their saris, mixing cement with mattocks to build new housing for their families.

The film was short on some of the detail I'd like to see - about exactly how the water and sewage systems work, for example - though this kind of territory is covered very well by series such as Grand Designs, which are more about the 'how' than the 'why'. This film focused more on Reynolds as a personality and his political battle, which has lessons for the rest of us. The end of the documentary was uplifting, with Reynolds - after years of fighting - managing to push a bill through his local senate to allow him to continue his experimental work in designated areas.

I highly recommend this inspirational documentary, which is by Oliver Hodge. You can also find out more about the film at Garbage Warrior.

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