This Week in Masks Making

It has been another week of making masks. Pictured toth e left is Miss Fields taking a break from making Panier Style Masks for adolescents. These are make from a cow jumping over the  moon print fabric. This fabric was donated a week ago with a large stash of prints and other fun things. 

    Miss Fields is also sitting at a new Kenmore Machine she has named Lacy. This machine is purring like a kitten. It was donated by someone from the nextdoor website. This was very generous and really helps us out. We are now getting to the point where we need to have machines repaired on a regular basis. We can now have three machines going at once and do not loose time to repairs.  

     Lacy also came with a sewing machine cabinet with several accessories and drawers. We have had a lot of luck with older machines. I beginning to wonder why people buy new sewing machines at all. 

    We also h/ad some good news from Duke University. They did a study on several styles of homemade mask. Our new Panier Style mask was only beaten by professionally fitted N95 Masks. Our Extended Olson also did very well. Still, it is nice to know that all the extra effort that goes into a Panier Style Mask is worth it. If it is going to be a pain in the neck to make them it is nice the extra effort is worth something. 

  The other nice thing about the study is that we are using the right material in the masks. This was more a guess on our part so it is mostly dumb luck. We will have to avoid using cotton fleece in the future. Even so we ran out it three months ago. 

     I would once again like to thank everyone that is donating to our cause. The fabric and machines have really given us the ability to punch above our weight in this crisis. If we were using our one machine and what ever fabric we could buy would would not have reach a thousand masks let alone be closing in on 3,000 masks.

    So be safe out there everyone.