The mask scraps quilt

Here we are still.

We suck.

I started making masks out of fabric I already had – the largest, ugliest pieces were 3-5 yards of $1/yard cottons that I bought a few years ago on a trip to Maine to use as foundation fabric – inside unseen stuff, for practice with dying/printing/whatever, or quilt backing if I couldn’t afford better later. This fabric became miles of bias tape for mask ties.

The face parts were made from a decent collection of fat quarters and half yards I’d collected over the years to line felted bags (that I used to sell at craft fairs). I chose the patterns that I liked the least or didn’t have something else in mind for them. All of these were the pleated surgical style and I was always left with a piece just a bit too small.

The second round of masks had me sacrificing prints I really liked, figuring they’d make me a little happier to wear, and more likely for recipients to wear. Many of them were souvenir fat quarters that I could remember buying from places I didn’t know when I’d visit again (there’s some Brooklyn, New Hampshire, and my original hometown in there) and with them came happy/sad/apocalyptic feelings, but ultimately it was good to let some go. But I still used the same three or four bias tape ties as before.

For the third round of masks, I treated? myself to some new fabric – most of these are the boldest geometric prints, and the skulls. I took to wearing the skulls exclusively and scared a little kid at one point, but at that point little maskless kids should not have been out in that particular public place, and there were scarier things going on. This was also the time I met my doppelganger in the supermarket muttering profanities under her mask with the same cadence as I was. I began experimenting with different styles and shapes of masks, so my scraps started to become jagged and swooped, and more wasteful.

The fourth round were smaller batches here and there, special requests, or us wanting one or two more of a newer style, better fit. By this point I finally ditched the bias tape and switched to elastic ties and toggles and sewed in little pockets for aluminum nose inserts.

And now all of those masks are mostly unused, since we switched to commercial ones with better protection.

(Which are now starting to pile up and I can’t just feed them to a landfill, so until there’s a good recycling option, I may turn them into a dog mat…)