Sewing Masks for My Community Was a Gift for Everyone Involved

Very soon after my Tallahassee, Fla., community began sheltering in place, brimming with that restless helplessness I know you all remember, I joined a local mask-making group on Facebook. As each of us became aware of the shortage of masks for our healthcare workers, and anticipated the horror of what that meant, a small army of amateur sewers gathered online, dusted off their sewing machines and did what we could with all our hearts.

We exchanged methods for making masks more efficiently, and shared alternatives for straps when quarter-inch elastic sold out everywhere. Sewers who had broken machines but a stash of fabric left it on the doorsteps of those with working machines but no fabric. Sewing parents set up mask-making stations alongside the desks of their distance-learning children and work-from-home spouses and churned out masks in every spare moment. In hindsight, I see this as the best part of that beautiful but brief period on the timeline when we were all on the same page, all standing together against the virus as a united front.

Early in my mask-making endeavor, I saw a video of a woman who expressed her anger about hospitals being businesses and that the wealthy owners at the top hadn’t done anything to shore up a stockpile of PPE to buffer against the not-unforeseen crisis we found ourselves in. She pointed out that the rhetoric of doctors and nurses being heroes was dangerous to them, because it propelled them into danger without protection. And, as always, she said, women are picking up the slack and paying for it with their own time, resources, money, and energy. But, yes, she was doing it anyway. And so was I. How could we not try to make a difference when we could? (My takeaway here, though, was that once there’s a handle on the crisis, the healthcare system needs an overhaul.) So I pulled out the trusty Singer I’ve had since I was eleven. The very machine my grandmother taught me on, the one I used to hack together a duvet cover for my best friend when she couldn’t find one for her extra-long dorm room bed on the eve of our college move-in date, the one I used to sew blankies for my babies. And I got to work.

I channeled my efforts into making masks for healthcare workers at our local hospital—the hospital where three of my five children were born. They had put out a very specific pattern and instructions for the masks they would accept for their employees and I threw myself into making sure the masks I made were the best they could be.

Around this time, my son, who was playing in our backyard, stepped on a rusty nail that went straight through the sole of his shoe and into his foot. I took him to the pediatric Emergency Room (he was fine, thank goodness) and the doctor there was wearing one of the masks from this mask-making initiative. Seeing that was incredible. I didn’t say anything to the doctor about it and I still wish I could have seen his actual reassuring smile rather than straining to see the smile-crinkle of his eyes, but I had come face-to-face with the way that doing our small part makes a difference, and not just that nebulous big-picture Difference, as truly great and necessary as that is, but a difference to one precious person.

My family was doing our part to stay home, a powerful yet passive-feeling service to the cause, but when I saw the doctor wearing a hand-sewn mask, I felt a relief of being in a position to do something more. And beyond the deep personal satisfaction of seeing the fruit of my labor, sewing masks gave me another gift, the gift of teaching my children. And it wasn’t just teaching my children to sew.

My nine-year-old son discovered he “loves to iron” (we’ll see how long that lasts!), but also learned that taking time to focus on the details affects the quality of the whole. My seven-year-old son, who struggles with feelings of being too little as the youngest of the “big kids,” was put on wire-measuring, cutting, and crimping duty and felt like he was part of something important and big. And my daughter, who’s the same age I was when I got my own sewing machine, learned not only to “measure twice, cut once,” but that there’s such a thing as a seam ripper, and that making mistakes is just part of creating something worthwhile.

My family worked together. We opened our hearts to the suffering and fear that others were facing and we did what we could to make our family part of alleviating that.