# A collar tape crossed out and rewritten, not replaced > A jumper's name tape carries two names in one household's hand — the first struck through, the second added fresh underneath, and the stitching redone at one end. August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-hand-me-down-with-two-names One small badge-sized print, sized to a jumper's actual collar tape. Two names stacked: R KOVA struck through with a single line, J KOVA written fresh beneath in a different pen. The stitching at one end has been unpicked and sewn again. The garment wasn't replaced. It was re-registered. ## What's actually printed on the collar tape here? A record of the same jumper being reassigned from one child to the next, at the size it was actually made. The design reproduces a woven name tape the way it would look sewn inside a real collar: two names in the same slot, the older one crossed through rather than removed, the newer one added beneath in a different pen. It isn't decoration standing in for the idea of a hand-me-down — it's the actual mark a household makes when a garment moves on to its second child. ## Why is this printed small instead of as a big chest design? Because a collar tape is meant to be read by one adult in a cloakroom, and printing it large would turn a private note into a slogan. The real object this is based on is never seen by anyone except whoever's checking whose jumper is whose at pickup time — a teacher, another parent, the child himself if he bothers to look. Blowing it up to fill a chest changes what it's saying: instead of a quiet piece of household admin, it becomes a statement made to a room. Kept small and placed the way a real name tape sits, it stays exactly what it is — proof that this garment has already done its job once. ## What separates a good version of this from an overdone one? Leaving the strike-through as a single line and the correction plain, rather than dramatising the handover. The tape doesn't need a border, a date, or extra ornament around it — the two names and the one struck line already carry the whole fact. Adding more turns a small administrative mark into something posed for effect, which undercuts the reason it reads as convincing in the first place: it looks like something a parent actually did in five seconds with whatever pen was nearby. ## Does printing a name like this need anyone's permission? Only the ordinary kind — the household's own names are the household's to print, the same territory as [a name sewn into every item that passes through one school's lost property](/stories/the-name-tape-in-everything). The names on the reference are invented, and a real one would be your own child's, so there's no outside licensing question the way there would be for a crest or a character. The only thing worth pausing on, the same as with any of a child's own belongings, is whether the older child minds seeing his crossed-out name go back into circulation on somebody else's shirt — worth asking once he's old enough to have a view on it. ## Does this work for a jumper with only one name in the collar, not two? Not really — a single name is just a name tape, and this design is specifically about the same tape holding two names in one slot. What makes this version work is the visible history: one name struck, not erased, and a second added rather than swapped in on a fresh tape. Take that away and there's no handover left to show — it becomes the far more ordinary object that [a garment kept in circulation and turned down rather than accepted by its second owner](/stories/the-second-one-refused-the-shoes) is the other side of. ## Isn't crossing out a name a strange thing to put on a shirt? No — the strike-through is what makes it a record instead of a label, which is the whole reason the tape looks the way it does. A single clean name would just say whose it is now. Leaving the old name visible and struck through says something more specific: this exact garment already belonged to somebody else, and the household kept it rather than starting over — the same reasoning behind [pulling a cot back down from storage instead of buying new](/stories/the-cot-that-came-back-out). Both names carry the same surname, which is the whole story in two characters. ## How does a small badge print like this actually print on fabric? Well, provided the woven texture of the tape is suggested rather than copied literally. A real name tape has a slightly raised weave that a flat print can't reproduce as texture, so the design renders it as clean linework at true collar-tag scale instead — the strike-through as one confident line, the second name in a visibly different weight of mark to read as a different pen. One or two ink colours against a plain ground is enough; anything more starts to look printed rather than sewn. ## How do I get one made? Describe the tape at [JustOG](/) — both names, and which one goes on top. 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](/shop). The stitching at one end is still slightly uneven where it was redone.