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I admit it... I was really excited when I scored a really great raincoat at the consignment shop for $11! I was even more excited about my Liz Claiborne knit pants and a coordinating sweater for $1 each from the thrift store! It's not that I can't afford to pay retail... but there is something innately rewarding about wearing great designer clothing that I didn't break the bank to own... and repurposing someone else's "discard" in the bargain!

I suspect a lot of people consider me to be cheap, but I prefer to think of myself as frugal. I grew up in a middle-class working family. My mother taught piano lessons before and after school for extra cash. My dad was a jack-of-all-trades and worked odd jobs to bring in extra bucks in and around his "regular" work. My mom and grandmother made nearly everything my sister and I wore - even into college, and I subsequently made almost all of my clothing for more than a decade after I graduated from college and entered the workforce.

My paternal grandparents lived on a farm, and as a child, I remember going to the root cellar to select home-canned vegetables and fruits for our dinner. My grandfather raised Black Angus cattle, and my dad and grandparents butchered the beef, which we stored in a deep chest freezer. We spend summers picking fruits and vegetables from the garden and orchard and helping to shell, blanch, peel and can them for later consumption. My mom grew up in a house where the day's groceries were ordered by telephone from the local store and delivered to the doorstep. But my dad's parents bought very little at the store - mostly flour, sugar, milk, coffee, and a loaf of "light bread" my grandmother used to make sandwiches for my grandfather's daily sack lunches.

So I learned from an early age how to "make do" with what I had - and how to be creative and stretch what we had to last and to make what I had look like what everyone else had so that I fit in with my friends. I remember how excited my sister and I would get when the new Sears and Penney's catalogs came each season. We would show our mom and grandmother the clothes we liked, and they would do their best to duplicate them. The fabric might not be quite the same as the item in the catalog, but it would be close enough. Mom took us shoe shopping twice a year when a well-known shoe store in a nearby city had its half-price sale. One year I had orange penny loafers - and Mother made clothes to match so that I got maximum wear out of everything! We didn't

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