These are homemade masks my wife and I made during the COVID 19 pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic there was a lot of problems with supply of several resources. Hand sanitizer and toilet paper are the big ones, but there was also a shortage of rubber gloves, meat, and medical facemasks.
People started buying out all these things, so they were impossible to get. When the Surgeon General said everyone should wear a mask there was a problem: The only masks you could find were expensive ones made by people trying to take advantage of the shortage. We bought a pack (white one in the picture on the bottom) and they were horrible. They shrank, were paper thin, and were too small. not wanting to spend 20$-40$ on overpriced masks we did not know were going to be good: we decided to make them ourselves.
We went out and bought cotton and flannel cloth and elastic bands and pulled out our sewing machine, pins, and thread.
We cut the cloth into even squares—about 5” by 9”—which was more time consuming than we anticipated. We had to start the actual sewing the next day. We pinned three pieces of cloth together—two pieces of cotton and the flannel on the outside, and sewed the edges together except for a corner. We attached the elastic in this process as well. Then, we turned it inside out so the flannel was in the middle, as it was the filter, and ironed it so it folded over a couple times. Then we re-sewed it all together, this time adding the pleats on the sides. The whole process took several hours, as we made about 18 masks (we bought way more material than we needed!), and it was a slow process at first.
In the end we were able to make lots of mask for very cheap. We ended up making 2 batches when the first ones were too small for me. The problem with these types of masks was you had to not use them more than once and wash them regularly. If you dry them in a typical drier they shrink a lot (2nd from the bottom in the picture). In the second batch we even picked out nice patterns to customize our masks (top mask in the picture)
These masks are something we use every day and quite worth the effort! The pandemic has sucked a lot, but making these things ourselves was a great way to spend some time in quarantine.
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