My husband has been asking me for a while to make a mask for him. I had gotten as far as googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, but today I bit the bobbin and whipped* one up.
*if in your idiolect "whipped" means "spent an uninterrupted 80 minutes completing while growing increasingly exasperated."
I read a blog post this afternoon from someone who has so far donated 300 masks. Three! hundred! masks!
If you have also been googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, I can recommend this one. I used ordinary cotton broadcloth from my fabric stash. At my husband's request I also added a nose support. I made a small casing at the bridge of the nose. I took some fine wire from the craft shelf, and recruited a kid to get the electrical tape and make me a small bundle with the ends carefully secured.
A big chunk of the reason it took me 80 minutes is that I don't have a dedicated sewing space. Usually my sewing machine lives on the back steps. Have we talked about the back steps recently? Long ago our house had a separate apartment upstairs, and they used a separate staircase and entrance. These days I store yarn, sewing supplies, and wrong-sized kids' clothes on one side of the back steps, with the other side kept clear so we could use the stairs in an emergency. But it is not very convenient to collect the sewing machine, the iron, the pincushion, the shears, the thread, the elastic, and the fabric, bringing them up one staircase and down the other and clearing a spot for them in the dining room. If I am going to be making a bunch of masks, I would prefer to find a better system.
I have sometimes thought that when our nest gets a little emptier I might turn the smallest upstairs bedroom into a crafting space, but our nest is SO FULL right now, SO SO FULL.
We have robins nesting in a spot I can see from this seat and I am going to be grateful that I did not have to build this nest with a beak and no thumbs. We have considerably more square footage per resident than the robins do, and no rain falling on the occupants.
Wait, I just had an idea. MAYBE if I move a stack of notebooks out of the server in the dining room, then MAYBE my sewing machine could fit in that space temporarily. AND THEN it would be out of sight when I wasn't sewing masks, and convenient when I decided to sew. But the sewing machine might also be too tall.
I will report back. I am sure the suspense will be weighing on you.
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