Her Dad’s Birthday Shirt

July 29, 2025

Clothes can be such a clear marker of a person. Sometimes it’s the style of clothes. If a person always sticks to a certain style it can start to read more like a personal uniform than just an outfit. Sometimes it’s the colour. The person seems to work that colour into almost every outfit. Sometimes it’s a single garment. It makes multiple appearances in photo albums on young and old versions of the same person. It seems like the person is always wearing it. It’s so iconic that the smallest scrap is enough to bring memories of that person front and centre. That is the case with this particular project.

I was approached by a woman with the most fascinating request. When her father turned sixteen, his mother made him a button up shirt for his birthday. That was 1939. He wore that shirt for the rest of his life. He wore it so often that this shirt seemed like an extension of him. He died recently at the impressive age of 102. She wondered if this shirt, the one that had been with him for 86 years, the one that springs him to life at the sight of it, could be made into three scarves. One for her and one for each of her siblings. I’m a very sentimental person and I couldn’t pass up this special project.

Getting three scarves out of a single shirt is no small feat. In the end, I managed to make three scarves that were 8” wide by roughly 70” long. I noted the size of each piece that I could get out of the shirt and then arranged the different pieces until each scarf was roughly the same length. The real miracle was that I was able to keep the white line running down the length of all three scarves with one small interruption where about 6” of the stripe is red.

The wool was coarse. You’d be hard pressed to find wool that coarse for sale these days but that’s exactly why the shirt lasted so long. Even though it was still in great shape there were some holes that needed to be repaired. The safety pins in the picture above are the locations of all of the holes. The picture below shows how the holes looked when the shirt was held up to the light. It was the best way to be sure I was catching them all.

I chose to patch the holes with a scrap of the shirt below the hole and matching thread sewn back and forth over the area on the visible side. I pinked the scraps underneath for added assurance that the patch wouldn’t also fray. The end result is an almost invisible mend without spending a wild amount of time on repairs.

The scarves also needed a backing so she picked a blue cashmere sweater that we repurposed for her sister, a velvet coat that had a special personal significance that we repurposed for her and a scarf with an uncanny mix of colours that perfectly matched the shirt that we repurposed for her brother.

This was a really rewarding project to work on. All three of them are thrilled with their scarves and I think it’s a really special way for them to bring their dad with them wherever they go.