Fabric Face Masks

There is some slight relaxing of the quarantine rules here in British Columbia, Canada. People must still keep to at least 6 feet of social distancing, and are encouraged to wear masks. The mask is to cut down on the possibility of  the wearer spreading anything if they are asymptomatic.

We have the disposable type of surgical face masks that you can get at a hardware store or car parts shop, and disposable gloves from when I had MRSA a few years ago.  Al uses these when he goes to pick up the groceries.

My daughter (the nurse), told me to sew a fabric cover to wear overtop as she felt it helped keep the paper mask dry to help keep out particles if someone sneezed of coughed nearby.

I only venture out to go for a walk or to pick up the mail from the superbox down the street from me. So far, if any adult approaches me, they cross the street right away, but in the last few days there has been a lot of children in the neighbourhood playing on their front gardens. They mostly seem to social distance as they play, but they dash around and never seem to notice adults. Yesterday, a girl of around 8 years, noticed me at the last moment. I had stepped out onto the road to keep the distance and she rushed straight at me to move her bike, which was about 3 feet from me...coughing as she ran!

Luckily, I had taken my daughters advice and sewed some fabric masks. Here is my favourite style to wear. I need glasses so with this style, the metal band fits snugly to the nose and does not make my glasses fog up!

I am a bit embarrassed to show the stitching detail of the mask as I had not used my sewing machine much in the last 10 years. It has survived two household moves and somehow the tension got jarred. The first mask was made with rather weird stitches, caused by my rough tension adjustments. And also made with my trifocal glasses not able to adjust to the angle I needed to stitch straight!!!

But as my daughter reminded me, the virus does not inspect the stitches...

The second mask is for my grandaughter. I adjusted the pattern to be shorter and have threaded the elastic through but not sewn it together, My daughter will try it on her, mark the elastic and sew it herself. Once the elastic is sewn together, It is tugged until the stitching is hidden in the the overlap.

I made this one with a flap to insert a filter. I think you can see it here. The first few masks I made were the square ones and I sewed a channel to slide the nose band metal strip into. It slides in and out for washing.



I did not like the look of the poor stitching line for the nose piece channel, as my tension adjustments are very rough estimates. So on these two I have used an iron on fusible hemming  tape to create that channel. I will see how it lasts. I can always sew in a channel if the tape does not work out.

The stitching on this one looks a little better after some more fine tuning. The sewing machine shops are closed of course, so I can not take it there for a tune up!