Same scale, same day, eleven weeks running
A hand-written column of eleven weekly weights on ruled paper — same scale, same day, a four-week plateau in the middle, and one circled figure at the bottom.
One column, ruled paper, biro. Eleven weights, a date beside each, running weekly from 01/05 to
10/07. The figures fall for five weeks, hold still for four, tick up once, then fall again. The
last one is circled.
A single weight tells a household nothing. Eleven of them, written under each other in the same hand, are the only way to see which way something is actually moving.
What is written on the sheet?
Eleven numbers and eleven dates, nothing else.
24.8, 24.2, 23.6, 23.1, 22.7, 22.3, 22.3, 22.3, 22.3, 22.4, 22.1, one beside
each Friday from 01/05 to 10/07. No units are written anywhere on the page — whoever fills it in
already knows what the number means. The only mark that isn't a figure or a date is a circle around
the last entry.
Why does the same day of the week matter?
Because it removes a variable the household would otherwise be guessing around.
Weight moves across a single day for reasons that have nothing to do with a trend — what's been eaten, how recently, how the scale was stood on. Weighing on the same day each week doesn't cancel that out, but it stops the noise being mistaken for the signal. It's the one piece of method on the whole sheet, and the cheapest part of it: it costs nothing but remembering which day is Friday.
Why are the four identical middle figures the hardest part to read?
Because a repeated number looks like nothing happened, which is exactly the thing worth recording.
22.3 appears four Fridays running. A glance skips over four identical entries the way it skips a
blank line — sameness reads as absence. A column exists precisely so that four weeks of no change
become visible as four weeks of no change, rather than dissolving into a vague sense that things
have settled. What the four figures mean for the animal is a question for the vet, not for this
sheet; what the sheet shows is that somebody kept writing the same number down for a month rather
than stopping.
Does a column like this only ever track a fall?
No — the same weekly line works just as well for a number climbing.
A puppy's weight is written down on the same rhythm for the opposite reason: not to catch a decline early but to watch a young animal fill out on schedule, which is its own kind of column worth keeping. The format doesn't know which direction it's recording. It only knows to write the same day, the same scale, and the next number underneath.
Does the sheet belong to anyone but the household that wrote it?
No. Ruled paper and a hand filling in a number each week isn't a design anybody licenses — it's the household's own record, in its own hand, and that's what makes it worth printing. No two of these columns hold the same eleven numbers.
Why keep a paper column instead of an app?
Because the column sits next to the other instruments a household keeps by hand, and a page reads faster than a screen.
A weight on its own says little without how much of the bowl went that week or how many times a day something happened sitting alongside it — three plain records, kept the same low-effort way, tell a fuller story than one app graph with axes nobody set. Paper also survives being pinned up where it gets checked, which a phone mostly doesn't.
Does it print well?
Yes — the whole point of the source is that it's plain.
Biro on ruled paper reproduces cleanly at any size, because there's nothing soft in it: the ruling is a hard line, the figures are hard strokes, and the only shading is where a pen went over a stroke twice. One ink, close to true black, on cream or a pale ruled-paper white. The circle is worth keeping slightly heavier than the rest of the marks — it was a second pass in the original, and should read as one on the shirt.
How do I get one made?
Describe the record at JustOG — how many weeks are in it, and which figure gets the circle. 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.
Eleven weeks, one column, and a Friday that hasn't been written yet.