Charity seems to be where all the action is at the moment. Mary Portas, in her TV series Mary Queen of Charity Shops, is trying to turn some dowdy outlets (owned by Save the Children, Barnardo’s and Mind) into chic and cheerful money-spinning boutiques. In Paris, Marie-France Cohen, who built up and sold the Bonpoint chain, has opened a stunning shop called Merci, and is giving all of its profits to children’s charities. The new charity, it seems, comes wrapped up in style — and about time I’d say.

Personally I’ve never had much luck in charity shops. Our best family find is a hand-tailored dinner jacket that my husband bought for £5 at the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association shop (which used to be in Kensington) when he discovered at the last minute that his dinner jacket was nowhere to be found. I’ve never managed to uncover much more than the odd blouse. Clearly the trouble is that I’ve not been imaginative enough. What I need is Mrs Jones (aka Fee Doran) to show me how to play the charity shop game.

Mrs Jones is a designer-cum-stylist. Her tastes are more towards the pop end of the aesthetic spectrum but she’s certainly inventive, and now she’s bringing her talents to the Oxfam branch at 89 Camden High Street, North London. Tomorrow and Saturday she is holding the first of several of her come-and-play workshops, designed to show us how to turn Oxfam finds into one-off specials. All are welcome, go to www.oxfam.org.uk/diy for details. Before everybody outside London turns away, let me say at once that she’ll be taking her ideas to at least three of this summer’s festivals (Glastonbury, Bestival and Leeds) and there will be an interactive section on her website.

Mrs Jones is the stylist who put Kylie into her famous white catsuit (the one she wore on the I Can’t Get You Out of my Head video). She’s also styled Goldfrapp and the Killers. At Oxfam, though, she is up to something different. She is a whizz at seeing the potential of a garment that you and I might easily discard. Not for her merely a change of buttons; she remakes on a big scale.

Take men’s shirts. I might think of wearing one as a nightshirt (indeed I have one) but it hadn’t occurred to me that the strong stripy cotton makes the most splendid skirts. Mrs Jones turns them round so that the buttons are down the back. The collar sits nicely under the bust like a high waistband, the sleeves are turned inside out, cut off at the elbow and stitched to make pockets. This creates what Mrs Jones calls a Vivienne Westwood-esque skirt. In other words, it’s quirky. She takes those ubiquitous big hippy skirts and turns them upside down (very Viktor & Rolf), pulling them in at the back and creating batwing-sleeved blousons. She takes gentlemen’s old silk dressing gowns and turns them into frocks.

If you like the idea of recycling then you should either try to go along to one of the workshops or learn online. Mrs Jones manages to make all these old-fashioned skills, such as altering, dressmaking and sewing, sound fun. In the shop and in the special tents set up at the festivals will be all the haberdashery essentials that are usually hard to track down — glue-guns, buttons, ribbons, fabrics, scissors and threads. She won’t be in the Camden shop all the time (she’s taking her sewing machine and haberdashery tools all around the country as well as to the festivals) but the manageress of the shop, who is there full-time, used to operate a sewing machine in the Portobello Road and is just as much into transforming discarded clothes and household things.

Mrs Jones doesn’t stop at clothes — she’s into recycling for the home as well. She takes old-fashioned knitted blankets and turns them into curtains. Some of the chicest curtains I ever saw were in a Dorset farmhouse where deep mustard yellow woollen blankets had been edged with maroon borders and they looked just perfect. She’s taken old newspapers, as well as music scores and sheets from discarded books, and used them as wallpaper. She has also used old jeans and anoraks to make curtains for changing rooms.

The idea is to encourage people who usually shop at Topshop to think less about buying new and discarding fast, and more about breathing new life into old things. I think that there’s lots there, even for those of us who are bit long in the tooth for Topshop. As Mrs Jones points out: “By transforming something old and making it your own you’ll own something that nobody else will ever have.”

Her golden rules for shopping the charity way: “Leave plenty of time. Have a really good scrimmage. Try things on. Look out for lovely fabrics and colours that could be the basis for something new.” And crucially — when it comes to clothes “don’t dress entirely in vintage — mix it up with something new”.

Those who find it easier to get to West London should know that Mary Portas’s charity shop — a pop-up version that will run foronly four weeks — opens today at Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush. Hurry, though, the clothes come from Mary, her colleagues at her Yellowdoor agency, and even from designers.

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