The doorframe marks were never really about height
Pencil marks ruled across a doorframe look like a growth chart. Read who was standing and who was crouching, and they record something else entirely.
A strip of painted doorframe, chipped down one edge. Seven marks ruled across it in pencil, deep grey, one hand throughout.
Each mark carries a name and a year. EMMA 06. TOM 03. EMMA 01. TOM 99. EMMA 97. TOM 95. EMMA 94.
Nobody got a height off this frame without somebody else holding the pencil.
Why is a doorframe the place a family keeps this record?
Because it's the one flat vertical surface everybody in the house walks past every day.
A doorframe doesn't need clearing off, doesn't get repainted round the way a wall does, and doesn't move house with the furniture. It's already there, already upright, already doing a job — marking it just rides along on top of that job for free. A front door does something similar with paint instead of pencil, one chipped layer standing for one year the household stayed, though nobody set out to build either record on purpose.
Why it never gets painted over
Because painting over the marks would be painting over the record, and the record is worth more than tidy woodwork. A frame chipped down one edge from years of measuring is doing exactly what it's for.
What does a height mark actually record?
Two people, not one.
The number on the wall says how tall somebody was on a given afternoon. What the mark actually proves is that a second person put down whatever they were doing, found a pencil, and got the first person to stand up straight against the frame while they crouched and drew a line. The height is incidental. Two people in that doorway at the same moment is the fact worth having.
Why is the year next to the name the readable part, and not the height?
Because a stranger can't do anything with a measurement in centimetres, but a year attaches straight away to everything else that was happening in that house.
Nobody remembers what a given height looked like on a nine-year-old. A year does the work instead — it locates the mark against a school, a street, a dog the family had then. The pencil line is really a timestamp wearing a ruler's clothes, and the top mark on a frame is rarely where somebody stopped growing. It's where they stopped living there.
Does it still work if the frame belongs to a house you've sold?
Yes — the print keeps the marks after the wall they were drawn on has changed hands.
The frame itself stops being reachable the day the keys go in an envelope, but the marks were never really about wood. They're a list of names and years in a particular order, and that order survives a move intact. A design made for the specific day the removal van arrives marks the leaving; this one carries one fixture out of the house being left.
Does it work with one child, or does it need several?
Either. A single column of one name repeated across years is its own kind of record, arguably a cleaner one, since there's no second name to read the marks against.
With two or more names the marks interleave the way EMMA and TOM do here, and the interleaving adds information a single column doesn't have — who was taller in a given year, whose mark stopped arriving first. A design that puts two names deliberately in one frame works from the same instinct: being measured together is a different thing from being measured alone.
Do I need permission to put a real name and year on a shirt?
No — a name your own family gave a child, and a date you were there for, isn't licensed from anybody.
Permission is a question about somebody else's work: a brand, a character, an artist's design. A doorframe covered in a household's own pencil marks has no such owner. It's closer in spirit to a private mark cut or burned into a surface to claim it than to anything that needed a licence in the first place.
Does it print well?
Yes, provided the marks stay marks and don't get redrawn as a clean chart.
The chipped paint down one edge and the slight waver in a freehand pencil line are what separate this from a growth chart bought at a shop — smooth them out and the generic version happens by accident. Flat colour with a hard edge is what actually survives being printed on fabric, so the graphite reads as one solid grey line and the paint damage reads as a shape, not a gradient.
How do I get one made?
Describe the frame at JustOG — how many names, what order, which years. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
Nobody's stood in that doorway with a pencil in years. The marks are still there, still in order, still legible from across the room.