The Bandana Signs Its Work

It's official. The bandanas have labels now.

Little sewn-on tags. Right on the corner. Four words: Waste less. Wag more. Stitched in, permanent, not printed. Printed comes off in the wash and then your dog is wearing a mystery.

Here's what changed. Somebody at a market picked one up, flipped it over, and asked who made it. Fair question! It's a bandana. It came out of a bag of scraps in somebody's mother's sewing room. There was no name on it anywhere.

So now there is.

Four words took an embarrassing amount of time. There was a version with "sustainably" in it. There was a version with a semicolon. I'm not going to tell you what the semicolon one said because you'd stop reading.

Waste less. Wag more. Half a mission statement, half a command. The dog is handling her end of it.

The tag does two jobs. It tells you which end is up, which sounds dumb until you've tried to get a patchwork bandana onto a wiggling dog at seven in the morning. And it tells the person who stops you on the walk where the thing came from.

That happens more than you'd think. Three people, one walk. Two of them wrote it down.

Does the dog care? No. The dog has never once cared. She'd wear a dish towel and feel great about it.

But now when somebody asks, there's an answer sewn right there.