Her handwriting is the artwork

The shirt above is a recipe in someone's handwriting. Ingredients, method, a heart before enjoy!

Nothing about it was designed. That's why it works, and it's the one case in all of this where the correct instruction is change nothing.

Why handwriting specifically?

Because it's a likeness. Not of a face — of a hand.

People recognise handwriting the way they recognise a voice. The way she makes a 3, the slant, the abbreviations, whether she writes tsp or teaspoon — those are as identifying as a photograph, and considerably more moving after somebody is gone, because a photograph is of them and handwriting is by them.

Which puts this in a different category from every other design here. Everything else is about choosing a register. This is about not intervening.

What should be reproduced?

All of it, including the parts that look like mistakes.

• The crossings-out and corrections. She wrote 350 and changed it to 325. Keep it.
• The stains. A recipe card with butter on it has been used, and use is the evidence.
• The abbreviations and inconsistencies — lg bowl, approx, the ingredient with no quantity because she never measured it.
• The margin note to somebody, or to nobody.
• The heart, the exclamation mark, the way it ends.

Tidying any of that produces a cleaner design and a worse object. What you'd be removing is precisely the proof that a person wrote it.

Isn't handwriting hard to reproduce?

It's the one thing that must be carried across untouched, and it's handled as an invariant here.

Text visible in an uploaded image is treated as pinned — quoted and kept word for word, never rewritten, never "improved". That rule exists because an earlier version of the system helpfully rewrote the words on somebody's design, which is not something anyone wants from a tool that was handed an existing piece of work.

For handwriting the same rule applies to the letterforms themselves. The scan is the artwork; the work is cleaning the paper away from the ink, not redrawing the ink. This is the opposite of the redraw that suits a photograph, and mixing them up is the main way this goes wrong.

What if the card is damaged or faded?

Damage to the paper can go. Damage to the writing is a judgement call.

Faded ink can be brought back, a stained background can be cleaned to a flat colour, a torn edge can be left as an edge or removed. Those are all repairs to the medium.

But a word that has genuinely gone — where the ink is missing rather than faint — can't be recovered, only guessed, and a guessed word in her handwriting is somebody else's handwriting. The honest options are to leave the gap or to note it. The same line holds for a face in a restored photograph: repair the medium, don't invent the content.

What else works besides a recipe?

Anything short, in her hand.

A note left on a kitchen table. The way she signs a card. A shopping list. A line from a letter. The phrase she always says, written out by her at your request — which is worth asking for now, while it's an easy thing to ask.

The requirement is legibility at chest size, which favours a short thing written large over a long thing written small. A full recipe works because it's read close up; a letter usually needs an excerpt.

Is this only for a mother who's gone?

No, and it's better given while she's here.

There's a version of this gift that's mostly grief, and it's a real one. But a recipe shirt given to the person who wrote the recipe is funnier and warmer — she gets to object to the choice of recipe, and to point out that you've printed the version before she fixed it.

Asking her to write it out fresh, knowing what it's for, is also a perfectly good route. The handwriting is the artwork either way.

How do I get one made?

Photograph the card at JustOG — flat, in daylight, the whole thing in frame — and say the handwriting should be kept exactly. 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.

Don't fix the spelling. The spelling is hers.