Mask Making Hui

Ever since our mayor mandated that everyone needs to wear a mask when going out of their house, anyone with a sewing machine has been making masks for their friends, family, neighbors, etc.

I have now made over 50 masks for relatives, friends and neighbors as well. In fact, it's all I've been doing every day for the last three weeks.

I've even enlisted Art to help at times. Here he is removing some stitching from my son's aloha shirt. Yes, Keola did give me permission to sacrifice his shirt to the cause. In fact, I've been making some masks to send to him for the whole family in Maryland. He didn't need them earlier because they weren't leaving the house, but eventually, it would be good to have a little protection.

Sewing machine repairmen are inundated with calls and can't meet the demand fast enough. Even though I just had my machine tuned and serviced less than a year ago, it started to make some terrible clanging, chugging sounds. What to do?

I got out my instruction manual. I looked at the photos. Took a deep breath and started taking it apart. Yes, yes... I know I should have called Art. I found a huge lump of lint under the "feed dog." I oiled the bobbin holder.

And then I tried to put it back together. That's when I started sweating. Did I totally goof up? I tried again for 15 minutes. And no... I wasn't going to call Art.

I went back to the manual and checked again. Uh oh... could it be? Was I really trying to put a part in backwards?

Yup. That was the problem. I put it back together and YAY! Double YAY! The clanking was gone. And it's running smoothly and the stitches are neat again. What a relief!!!

(Art did tell me later that's why he takes photos of each step when he takes anything apart. He was proud of me though.)

I started sewing more masks.

And that's when I ran into the next problem. I was out of elastic!!!  I had ordered more on Amazon but it won't be here until the end of the month.

And here's the wonderful thing. Art and I belong to a group of four couples that meet every Thursday for tai-chi which is now cancelled until the pandemic is over. We also go out to dinner every couple of months (which is also on hold). Well, all four of the women sew and we starting texting each other with ideas, hints, and alerts if we saw something we needed was on sale. The daily texts have been awesome in keeping us motivated and focused! We are all sewing for our families, friends, etc. It's sort of a hui. That's a Hawaiian word that means a group working together for a common cause.

We all had different ideas for the materials we could use for elastic including hair ties, paracords, shoe laces, ribbon, etc.

The latest idea was horizontal strips of t-shirt. And you know what? It wasn't too bad.

This is what I've been doing from 8:00 AM to probably 7:00 PM. My kids think it's stressing me out, but it's also kept me from being bored. It feels great to be doing something useful that might be helping someone else here.

Therefore, I must apologize for not being able to visit you for the time being. I'm bound to run out of material soon though...

Then again, my son does have another aloha shirt I can take apart.