Sewing

I fetched the sewing machine from the basement, along with the five boxes of fabric and the three sewing boxes that were there. (The sewing boxes were mine, my mother’s, and my mother’s friend’s.) First, I sorted through the sewing boxes and consolidated and tossed. Then, I sorted fabrics, looking for cotton good for masks. The cotton fabric I washed and dried twice on super hot cycles - not for decontamination, but to shrink before sewing. I also consolidated, folded, and tossed my other fabrics, down to three boxes. And I found elastic and bias tape and other notions.

Finally, I pulled out the sewing machine, which I bought in 1981. It squealed when I started it - loud enough to drown out the radio. As it turns out, this happened the last time I used the sewing machine two years ago. Not only did I have “sewing machine oil” from back then, I had seen it recently and was able to find it quickly! There came a couple of hours of dismantling it, oiling the eighteen points listed in the manual, trying it out again, taking it apart again, running it by hand, running it with test fabric, trying to mop up the oil so it didn’t cover the fabric when I was sewing...

So just twelve hours later I had four masks! They smell slightly of machine oil, but will be laundered well. I suspect the next few masks will be faster.

These are not medical grade masks. They don’t meet the specs of our local hospital’s donation site - I don’t have the proper materials or skills for those masks. But, I read, they can do an effective job for what is important for the apparently healthy general population: protecting others from me in case I’m not actually healthy, and keeping me from touching my own face, thus statistically slowing the spread. They could provide a small amount of protection for me from unhealthy people I am exposed to. But if everyone wears these when out and about, it will help slow the spread overall. And these stay in place better than bandanas and are easy to breathe through.

So my plan is to make them for my family, friends, and neighbors. Doing this gives me some illusion of control and helping. I can while away nights and rainy days when I can’t be in the garden for a while, listening to books and podcasts.