Fitting and mending a black watch plaid shirt

Fitting

My Mom gave me this black watch plaid shirt sometime in 2008 or before. It was made and sold as a man's shirt and worn by a male family friend who died and whose clothes got passed down to us. It was cut the way shirts designed for male bodies generally are: broad shoulders, long and full sleeves, and straight up and down torso. In 2010 or thereabouts, I altered the shirt to have trimmer sleeves and shoulders and a slightly indented waist. I don't have a picture of how it fit me before these alterations, because I wasn't yet thinking seriously about Marga Mends.

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Mending

By December 2019, the shirt had a number of holes and worn fabric. I fixed these by sewing in interior patches that I made from scraps of some once-mended and finally ripped beyond repair black watch pajama bottoms. I also did lots of hand stitching through the original shirt and interior patches to tack down and reinforce the frayed and worn parts of the shirt. In the pictures that follow, you can see the lighter pajama plaid peeking through underneath the larger holes in the shirt. Where the holes were smaller, you can only see evidence of my mending if you look closely.