Stitch Remnants and Fabric Into Masks

As concerns grew over the shortage of masks and mask covers for health-care workers, Maria Varela, a fashion-studies major at Columbia College Chicago, realized that her ability to sew had new value. “I have the exact skill people are calling out for,” she says.

Varela soon joined the faculty in her department on #ColumbiaMakesMasks, a project to create covers for medical-grade N95 masks to prolong their usable life, with an initial goal of producing 2,000 of them. More than 50 students, faculty, and staff signed up to participate. They were mailed mask-making kits, which included 100-percent-cotton fabric; flat, braided elastic; thread; sewing instructions; and a prepaid return envelope.

The department also shipped out about three dozen sewing machines for students to complete their coursework and contribute to the effort. Faculty members led virtual information and stitching sessions for the students to work together.

Other mask-making projects have whirred into action all over the country. Caroline Berti, a fashion designer and adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York, joined another FIT alumna, Karen Sabag, in March to organize Sew4Lives, a network of volunteers sewing masks. More than 4,000 have been delivered so far to hospitals, homeless shelters, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, a prison, and postal facilities.

Saint Francis U.

Theater students at Sinclair Community College, in Ohio, have collaborated with peers in the costume department at Wright State University nearby to produce several hundred masks for essential workers in the region. The effort has given students an outlet for frustration and kept them busy, says Kathleen Hotmer, Sinclair’s costume-shop manager and an adjunct faculty member there.

And the pandemic prompted Bonnie Resinski, who has been sewing costumes for the theater department at Saint Francis University, in Pennsylvania, for more than 50 years, to remember yards of leftover fabric used for scrubs in a 1998 production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In less than a week, she stitched together 120 masks for local health-care workers, and she is making more. “As long as I have elastic and fabric,” she says, “I’ll keep going.”

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