Instagram: Kellymichelliee
Four months ago, in mid-March 2019, the Coronavirus pandemic was making a hard entrance into the USA and mask provision in healthcare settings were starting to become very restricted. I had been working from home for a couple weeks and a nurse in my neighborhood was increasingly concerned about mask provision at work. It only took a couple days before I received a message saying, “We are officially out of masks” and “scarves and bandanas are last resort items if no mask is available”. It was then I felt the urgency to start sewing. My own profession, within the healthcare industry, made me acutely aware of the concern she was feeling and I felt like I needed to step up. This birthed my new endeavor to fill a small portion of the “emergency face mask” gap; hand making cloth face masks for free for all those that work in healthcare.
I had only been sewing off and on for a couple years. Being self taught, I sewed, embroidered and donated baby blankets for the Levine Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
I went from sewing baby blankets to masks overnight.
From the start, it was difficult to find American youtube tutorials about sewing masks and mask patterns since it wasn’t common here. So, I created and altered my own pattern several times after watching international tutorials and started a GoFundMe on March 22, 2019, to be able to buy materials upfront, while they were still available.
Since I mostly made snuggly baby blankets, I lacked the stock of 100% cotton, abundant interfacing, and elastic. Initially, my goal was to just sew and distribute 200 masks to all those that contacted me from healthcare organizations. This quickly changed as the mask urgency increased, and so did the donation contributions. It was around this time that I joined the Carolina Mask Makers initiative on Facebook- I was one of the first 15 members.
To date, the generosity and support from 80 Donors helped me buy the material I needed to create over 1,000 masks upfront for free to those that work in healthcare. This also paid for the shipping and supplies needed for shipping to those in 23 different states. Almost half of all the masks I’ve sewn have gone to NYC, the epicenter of the pandemic, alone.
One message I received from a Paramedic in NYC said, “When I learned you donated the masks for our crew I was overjoyed! It was around the time PPE was really limited. We had to use one N95 mask for the whole week, regardless if we came in contact with a positive patient or not. What you are doing to help us is nothing short of amazing”.
Another Paramedic said, “This totally changes the way I protect myself”. It’s with this response that I continued masking masks and sending them across state lines for those in healthcare.
I started with providing masks to people I directly knew in healthcare, and then expanded to connecting with others who learned by word of mouth or through Instagram. Because so many of us are making different mask fits and patterns (and appropriate mask-wearing is new to many people), I then created a wear-and-care video, uploaded it to Youtube and had personalized apparel tags created with a QR code so all those that received masks had full disclosure about what they were wearing, how to wear it properly and care instructions. Donated masks have gone out to Doctors, Nurses, Patient Care Teams, Therapists, Paramedics, and Emergency Medical Technicians, Pharmacists, and more.
Over the past 4 months, the ear loop material I’ve used has changed several times due to stock limitations (from different elastic widths to ribbon elastic and elastic cord) but I’ve been able to continuously provide a 3 layer curved mask product with pleats for face fit. I assembled them with 2 layers of 100% cotton, 1 layer of polypropylene interfacing and a filter pocket to hold cut to size Filtrete filter paper from the start. While I assembled masks, my husband would disassemble the polypropylene filters from Filtrete and cut them to 4×6” rectangles to stuff into the pre-washed mask pockets before sending them out.
Along with masks, some nurses reached out for ear savers. I also purchased and donated over 100 headbands with buttons!
Recently, I have had less need from the medical community for cloth masks and more of a need from the public- for those immunocompromised and for children. I’ve taken a new direction with some mask creation for “Survivors”, those currently going through chemotherapy or those that are survivors from disorders/diseases. Masks may be a new part of our daily life for a while, and I wanted to embrace what we have overcome on masks as a new way to express ourselves during a time when many may feel like they need to hide behind them.
To this day, now four months later, I’m still making masks and project to do so throughout this year. I now have a new goal to provide masks to all 50 states in the USA.
Thank you, Kelly, for sharing your personal mask-making journey and photos with us! If you are a mask maker or recipient of masks from The Carolina Mask Project and would like to share your story, you can contact us using the form below. We want to share the experiences of mask makers and recipients in the Carolinas in addition to our news and updates.
