If you’ve been here for a while, you may remember the saga of the most terribly made sweaters I’ve ever encountered (from Madewell, and no, the irony of the name does not escape me). Wander back to early 2023 if you want the details, it was a whole thing.

Well the green one went in the back of the closet for a nice long time out, and I pulled it out the other day. I’ve decided it’s going to be one of this winter’s pajama sweaters. Now, I know enough about how this was made to know that it will absolutely fall to tatters as I wear it (in my house, over my pajamas, as I live my fairly sedentary, low-demand lifestyle, in an environment that simply should not be challenging for a functional sweater). And because I know it will fall to pieces, I’m not actually going to put hours and hours and hours of my skilled labor into patching the holes in the elbows, because I know from the other sweaters in this batch that the fabric around the patches will just fall out as well.

But what I am going to do is show you how it degrades (you can watch a video on patreon if you want, it’s free and anyone can see it, that’s just the easiest place to host the video).

I’m going to take the Gleener to it every time it comes out of the wash (brief aside, love both the tool and the company, it’s a great gizmo that does a really good job at what it does and the folks there are absolutely lovely, highly recommend, absolutely none of my vitriol about the sweater has anything to do with the Gleener, it’s a marvelous tool and should be in your bag). And I’m going to show you what comes off. And what happens to that hole. And how badly it disintegrates with a few weeks of wear.

In fact, if I get full on crafty grandma about it, I may even manage to save the fluff in a bag and date it so we can track what percentage of the sweater wears off every time it gets worn. Though I make no promises, as sometimes the ADHD overtakes me and I forget these things. But I’ll try.

Because oh, oh I’m good at taking care of my clothes. But this is a garment made to fall to tatters after three normal wears. And there’s no level of careful washing and mending that can counteract that level of bad craftsmanship.