Makers gonna Make….

In my attempt to write something every week this year, I did not anticipate how much change the world would go through in that time. And right now seems like it is the time to take a break from grinding through all the fanciful costumes and have a bit of real talk and acknowledge that things in the world are changing drastically and quickly.

The first week of March, my company gave the order to work from home for the rest of the month. That weekend was my husband’s birthday and also the weekend everyone was told to please stay home. We had no idea at the time what was coming; the shelter in place order was still 2 weeks away. But I had that sense of dread and foreboding that things were getting very serious very quickly. We tried to maintain normal as long as possible. It was my husband’s birthday that weekend, so we decided to stay home and bar-b-que. Never one to do anything halfway, we did actually bar-b-que some meat in a smoker, spending our Saturday tending a low hickory fire (Southern ‘bbq’), and we also grilled some burgers, the ‘backyard bbq’ sense of the word. For that entire week, we ate leftover smoked meats: pulled pork tater tot/nachos, brisket sandwiches, pulled pork mac’n’cheese….anything we could think of. As far as apocalypses go, we were at least eating well.

As time wore on and Joe’s company also eventually ordered working from home, the daily news got more and more dire, and everything we had been doing or planning to do ground to a halt, it became more and more difficult to emotionally be a creative person. I was not keeping my shit together, as it were. Not flat-out panicking…. but reading hours of news articles rather than doing something relaxing or productive. Following the statistics, watching the curve in every state and country. Obviously, all of the dancing events were cancelled. No classes, no balls. Nowhere to wear giant silly dresses. The motivation to keep sewing was low. And as I became more and more convinced that my summer events will be canceled too, it became much harder to sew for those, particularly because I don’t like the style of clothing it requires. When it already feels a bit like a job to create something, just so you fit in with the event’s theme, it’s very easy to lose momentum.

So I continued trying to push through it. I tried focusing on only making things I really wanted to make/enjoy making, and skipping the things that feel like work. I finished a petticoat, which feels like progress. I was feeling scared to see what the world will look like over the next few months. Feeling sad for the people you can’t help and the situations you read about but can’t solve. And feeling somewhat guilty…. I’m still employed (which could disastrously change at any second if the economy tanks, but for now, I am gratefully still employed). I’m working from home, actually enjoying it (I’m on week 3 and still like, yes, this is exactly what I want.) And I do have food and resources and crafting supplies and video games. I could comfortably and probably quite happily just hang out for a few months and not be terribly uncomfortable. But I know so many people aren’t so fortunate. It feels wrong to be happy or to even consider not being abjectly miserable in the face of what’s happening in the world. I know there are much more serious things than whether I’m making dresses or not. So, you know, the general feelings of helplessness that people feel when the entire world is spiraling out of control.

And then the president of the nearest hospital posted a call for anyone who can sew to help make masks for the healthcare workers. I messaged him and he e-mailed me a pattern. This happened at, like 10 p.m. I placed a curbside pick-up order from my local Joann, and spent an hour finding a few springy cotton prints. Easter pastel plaid, blue with white daisies, grey with coral and teal flowers. The hard part was elastic. Lots of hospitals around the country are now asking for home-made masks. So every fabric store is sold out of 1/4inch elastic. Even Amazon says they’ll deliver me some by April 20. So I managed to get a few rolls of 1-inch wide elastic and I decided I’d try to cut it in half. This was Sunday night.

Monday morning, I was working, having meetings, drinking coffee, eagerly awaiting the notification that my fabric and elastic are ready for pick-up. I came home and spent a few hours assembling 2 sizes of masks, according to the pattern he had sent. I color coded them by size. Most places are requesting pleated rectangular masks, but this one was requesting the round cup-shaped ones. It was a bit fiddly, but it worked out in the end. Cutting the elastic seems to have worked, too. It creates quite a mess while cutting it, but once finished, I was able to sew them on such that the raw/cut edge is away from the wearer’s skin and the flat finished edge is the side that wraps around the ears.

In the end, I made 20 masks. The hospital has a large donation bin outside the main entrance. No visitors are allowed inside. I don’t know if it’ll help or if anyone will use them. Even if they just give them to people who are sitting in the waiting room or people who just feel better wearing a mask but aren’t part of the actual patient-facing medical staff, that’s great. If it brings someone comfort, fine. If it helps someone not get sick, even better. It gave me some amount of purpose. It helped me feel some small amount of control, of being able to help, when everything feels so big and overwhelming.