Clear the Decks

There's a new project in town: face masks! While sewing these past few days, I'd been idly wondering if there might be a need for home-sewn face masks to fill the rapidly expanding void of PPE available to our hospitals and civilians. It seems there is!

So today I put the finishing touches on my Shoo-Fly Leader-Ender project, bringing it to the point where it could be put away for a while, yet picked up again easily. That meant sewing the last of the 520 posts to the last of the 520 sashings, and sewing those to the last of the 130 blocks.

I'm trying to drink more water--every cup of coffee gets followed by an H2O chaser.

Most of this had been done earlier this week, and was collecting on the ironing board.

It took most of the afternoon, but I can now set these aside with the knowledge that they'll be easy to put together when Project Face Mask is done.

Looks are deceiving: there really are 65 blocks in each stack. I counted them again to be sure! The blue border fabric is thicker than the white, which is probably why that stack looks so much taller.

This weekend I'll be playing with three mask patterns and several types of fabrics, wearing the results to determine how breathable they are. Several members of Austin Harmony Chorus are banding together to find where in our community masks are most needed, get them made, and get them delivered. It's amazing how fast this project came together!

I'll be sharing my results here too. Stay tuned!