Let’s talk about masks again.
I made this post a while ago and it’s getting some traction and I saw someone flip out at someone on CoF for wearing a mask, so let’s talk about how the context that advice is given in is important.
NOTE: I’m in USA, but I’ll try to provide context for people in other countries.
Context for non-USAers: At the beginning of the spread of Coronavirus in USA, the Center for Disease Control suggested to not wear a mask if you weren’t sick, since “wearing a mask offers little protection from the virus.”
The actual reason for this suggestion is that USA’s hospitals are not properly stocked with enough masks and respirators to get through even a higher-than-average flu season, and there were concerns that people would hoard disposable masks and respirators, which would divert the supply from hospitals and doctors offices and cause greater shortages than already expected.
Recently, the CDC said that wearing a homemade cloth face covering when you go out is a good idea to help prevent virus spread. This is not because new information came out that suddenly changed their minds. This is because it’s been advantageous this whole time, but there’s now a much lower risk of people being able to panic-buy hospital-grade PPE. This is a lower risk because we’re already out of it. Can’t buy what doesn’t exist.
EDIT: The CDC’s term is “nonmedical face covering,” to further clarify that medical supplies should be reserved for hospital settings and medical personnel.
So, while my old guide on kinds of PPE was based on what to wear when there’s not a massive worldwide and countrywide shortage of various protective gear, let’s talk about what to do when there IS.
Disclaimer: I’ve done a lot of research into this but I’m not an expert.
Part #1: If someone has something in front of their face, and they didn’t ask for your opinion about how it looks or works, don’t share it. All options right now are insufficient options. You don’t need to make someone feel like they’re doing it wrong just because you know slightly more about this than they do. If someone has two layers of fabric over their face, their cough particles don’t go all the fuck over everywhere if they cough. One maskmaking shop in LA found that two layers of cotton blocked 60% of particles over 3 microns. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if your options are having someone next to you cough a full force cough or cough at 40% force, you should know which one to choose.
It might make you feel more prepared to tell someone posting a coord wearing a mask that their mask isn’t protecting them because there’s gapping around their nose. It might make you feel more prepared to spot the flaws in their PPE and point them out. But you need to be really honest with yourself about if you’re doing it to help them or if you’re doing it to make yourself feel better. In the end, did you make a comment that might encourage someone who has two pieces of fabric in front of their face to stop putting those fabrics in front of their face? It’s the wrong comment.
Part #2: Your mask is as dirty as the inside of your butt. Firmly lodge this idea into your head. The insides and the outsides of your mask are contaminated. You know about not touching your face, right? Don’t touch your mask, either.
If you need to adjust it, grab it right on the edges by your ties/elastics. Don’t go grabbing the front of it. Clean your hands after you touch your mask, too.
Likewise, that guy next to you? His mask is as clean as his butt. Keep an eye on where he’s touching it and where that hand goes. Don’t go off on people on CoF wearing masks wrong, but worry the heck about people near you touching their masks.
It doesn’t matter how good your mask, or anyone else’s mask, is at stopping you from getting sick or spreading sickness. If you take the things that the mask is preventing from being spread, rubbing those things on your hands, and then putting your hands onto community stuff, you’ve negated any good your mask can do.Â
Part #3: PREP YOURSELF THE BEST YOU CAN. Make sure that you and your family and your friend’s PPE is the best you can realistically make (without diverting the supplies of disposables from professionals). Does it fit at the sides, bottom, and top? Have them put the mask on and inhale sharply. The majority of the air should be coming in through the front of the mask. Exhale sharply. Ideally, the air should be coming out through the front of the mask. It’s likely coming out through the gap under the eyes, instead. Unless you have really good nose wires or are willing to use skin tape, you might have to live with that. The important thing is that the air should not be going out the sides or the bottom. If it goes up into your eyes, you’re spreading your respiration germs into your eyes, which isn’t great, but if your nose has coronavirus then your eyes probably also have it. If it’s going out to the sides, you’re spreading your respiration germs into other people who potentially don’t already have those germs.
Troubleshoot your mask fitting until you are confident that it’s not leaking. Make sure you can breathe with it on. Make enough that you can wash your masks and still have one to wear.
Make the mask out of two different fabrics, or write “back” on the back of them with a fabric marker. The inside of your mask catches things that should stay on the inside, and the outside of your mask blocks stuff that should stay outside. If someone coughed on the outside of your mask, the last thing you want to do is turn it around and hold their cough right up next to your nose.
Make enough masks that you can trade them out if one gets soiled. Wash your mask at least as often as you wash your underwear (and let’s not have any Big Hero 6 shenanigans about wearing them inside-out. It’s gross) and have enough that you can change masks in the middle of the day if you have to.
Part #4: Do what it takes to make you and your housemates to wear masks when going out. You know how when you have a two year old who doesn’t want to eat squash, so you pretend the spoon is a plane and make it into a game? You know when your boomer dad doesn’t want to wear a mask, so you put his favorite movie quotes on it and turn it into a game? Your mom won’t wear a mask unless you put a hole for her to drink coffee through a straw? Will putting a straw flap in it get her to not touch her face? Is it better than nothing? Yeah, sometimes “better than nothing” is all we’ve got.
You can make masks that match your clothes! You can make different models of masks and see what is the most comfortable. You can make masks with silly monster teeth on them. We haven’t had high-quality pandemic like this since 1918. We have no social rules for what is acceptable behavior. If it SPREADS the disease, or makes it harder for other people to be safe and comfortable and free of the disease, it is bad behavior. If it prevents the spread of a disease to people outside your household, makes you more comfortable, and doesn’t come at the cost of any other person’s safety or comfort, it’s fine. It can be weird and still be fine.
If you’re making masks, listen to your housemates’ comments about mask comfort. Make them comfortable masks. We don’t have a lot else to do.
Part #5: Please don’t go into the store to go fabric shopping if you can order it online for pickup or make it out of your fabric scraps. A lot of fabric stores have a medium-large customer base who are both in the age range most likely to die from COVID-19 and in the range of people who believe that the coronavirus is made up to convince people to let socialism into their homes. These are people who need to be protected and who are refusing to protect themselves. Regardless of if you care about accidentally killing someone’s Meemaw, people who are not protecting themselves from the coronavirus are a danger to you. Don’t go in there.
Fabric.com has not been updating their inventory to avoid stress on their employees, but they still have almost 35,000 different 100% cotton quilting fabrics. Support fabric stores that are successfully reducing the contact their employees must have with the public, and stores that are reducing the customer’s ability to contact each other. Remember, if you go into a store and you see people crammed closer than 3′ apart, your immediate reaction should be, “well, I’m going to leave here right now.” It’s not just about your safety. It’s about the safety of everyone else, and about wanting to support companies who believe that public safety is more important than maximum profits.
If you don’t want to go to the fabric store, because you don’t want to support a non-essential store during a Stay at Home order, you can purchase t-shirts, sheet sets, pillowcases, some kinds of toweling, and other things made of comfortable, breathable, washable fabrics at big stores like Walmart. Many non-coated drop cloths and shop towels at hardware stores will also work. You don’t have to support fabric stores’ decisions to remain open right now.
ALSO. Every fabric store is out of elastic. You can still make masks with ties. Do not panic about the elastic and ESPECIALLY DO NOT YELL AT EMPLOYEES ABOUT THE ELASTIC. You will not die without your elastic. You will survive without the elastic. Do not be an ass about the elastic.
Part #6: masks are fast to make and don’t take a lot of fabric. If you can make ten or more, there’s a site called MakeMasks2020 that helps distribute handmade masks to healthcare facilities that need them. You can also contact your local veterinarian. Many vets have given their supply of disposable masks to the hospitals, and are looking for homemade ones so that they can do emergency procedures without putting the animals into unnecessary risk. If you don’t have a pattern for making masks, MakeMasks2020 suggests the Clover Mask for sending to hospitals. I’ve made a couple of these myself and the pattern’s very clear and fast and makes a comfortable mask.
Context for non-USAers: yes our healthcare system is so bad that in the year twenty twenty we are sewing masks at home for hospitals because the hospitals don’t have enough masks. We’re going to just send our doctors and nurses into rooms with infectious patients with nothing but two pieces of calico and a coffee filter to protect them. We already have hospitals where nurses and doctors are being given one disposable mask and told to make it last all shift (or sometimes as long as five days). If your country doesn’t need reusable masks made for its hospitals, you can still send masks to our hospitals if you want. (I don’t know if this is going on in other countries. I’m a bit wrapped up with what’s going on in mine)
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So, now that we’ve had six parts of disclaimer, let’s get into why we’re really here: why did I say that wearing a bandana as a mask was useless when I made my original PPE post last year, but I’m now suggesting everyone sew bandanas into masks and wear them out in public?
Analogy time: What if I told you that my plan to prevent a fire in my house was to leave open flames and candles everywhere, and when the house caught on fire, run into the upstairs bedroom and wave out the window for the fire department to rescue me with a ladder? That sounds like a really stupid idea. A better fire safety system would be to keep burning flames in my sight, install a good fire alarm system, have two fire extinguishers on every floor, and know to leave out the front door and stand safely outside to wait for the fire department.
My house was not on fire when I made the last post. You could easily go to the hardware store and buy as many n95, p95, n100, and p100 masks as your money could get you. You could also go buy surgical masks with the same money. Both options were there, so if you’re dyeing things, which is better? A n95+ mask is better for particles like sanding, a carbon mask is better for ambient smoke, and an OV cartridge on a reusable respirator is still the best for toxic gasses. There were a lot of options. Some were better than others for different tasks. It mattered which was the best one.
My house is now on fire. We’re trapped upstairs and our options are to wave our arms out the front window so the fire department can get us with a ladder, or sit on the floor and pretend nothing is happening. Yeah, it would have been REALLY GREAT to have a fire extinguisher back when this started, but we dont’ have that option anymore. We can’t go to the hardware store and get an n95. We can go to CVS and buy surgical masks. Our options are either A) a pretty bad solution that won’t fix everything as well as a good solution that is no longer available would have or b) pretend that nothing’s wrong, go to Joann, and cough on everyone.
Our house is on fire now. Everything I said in that last post is technically true, but it was made to be relevant in a world where the house was not on fire. The house is on fire now.
The house is on fire. Please put something in front of your face when you go outside.
I will still stand by one thing I said before, though: please don’t cut your bra up to make it into a mask. Even if you can’t sew, it’s a really difficult and expensive way to make a mask that won’t work very well.
Use the bandana hack instead of the bra hack. Work smarter.
I promise I’ll be much more into posting our regularly scheduled lolita fashion tutorials soon. I keep having to disassemble and reassemble my sewing machines because I’m helping maskmakers on twitter fix their machines, so working on any project has been going slowly.
Also if your sewing machine breaks while you’re making masks, please contact me on twitter @ aPOLLYgz with some pictures, and I’ll see if I can help. That’s been my major contribution to the maskmaking project.
