Last Chance for Gas

Had a minute at work to look it up, and I did find the title!

Okay this is the last one I mean it. Floral print pinwale corduroy, one layer of midweight fusible non-woven interfacing. Loops instead of straps, because I thought maybe I could bobby-pin in in place, but I ended up putting cord through the loops. The first one that is not unbearably hot to wear. Matches my pinafore, because if you can make a fashion statement like that, you are an idiot not to.

I made this one to address something I have seen a fair few times in the comments and the tags of the post with the original pattern, which is people being sad that they don’t think they have the skills to make the quilted plague mask. Because you probably could! Even without a machine, a lot of us suddenly have a lot of free time and you don’t need much in the way of materials, just patience and a willingness to carefully stab.

But there are two reasons I put that disclaimer in there.

The first is that I have never written a pattern like this before, but I have made things like this a lot. That means that I am making a lot of assumptions about what needs to be explained, and there are all sorts of rules and steps that are obvious or intuitive to me that I probably missed out. I glossed over some things like making sure the fabrics and the pieces are facing the right way, or the right type of stitches to use for certain bits. These are little absences that might screw up a beginner in a big way, and I didn’t want anyone to be upset or feel stupid when they couldn’t get it to work when the error was in my explanation. If I was an actual pattern writer I would have had people of different skill levels test the instructions out and let me know what I missed; instead I typed it and pressed the post button without even a spell check.

The second reason is that this pattern is unashamedly unnecessarily complicated. No one needs to use 44 bits of fabric to make a mask. It is dumb and fun and absurd. The difficulty is the point.

But there is a middle ground too, and I want to thank everyone who commented or tagged their intention to sew a plague doctor mask out of denim for motivating me to do this. You are the only ones who really 100% got the spirit of this dumb idea, and I look forward to seeing your Jlague Joctor Jasks roaming the wasteland.

To that end, here is a revised version for a single fabric.

It is comprised of two body pieces that you cut two of each, and has easier to match curves and a lot of little marks to hopefully make it easier still. It is US letter sized, but unless you have borderless printing, a small amount will probably be cut off. Alternatively, this A4 sized one will print on A4 (obviously) and US legal paper without losing any at the edges. This version has much thicker lines because it doesn’t need the accuracy of the original, and it has a scale so that anyone without access to a printer can trace it straight from their computer screens.

Apart from the rounding off, it is almost an identical shape to the original, except the curve at the neck is deeper after I got some feedback that maybe it was a bit tight.

I have not re-written the instructions, but the method is the same as the original, just skipping all the bits where you piece together a pile of slightly different triangles. I also did not include the circles, but if you are doing it the complicated way from the other pattern, the inner that aligns with the eyehole edges is 1¾ inches in diameter, the middle is 3 inches and the big one is 4¼ inches. But if your fabric is heavy enough, I would probably recommend just putting some fray-stop on the edges of a neatly cut single layer of fabric.