HOW TO MAKE A DIY AZORES INSPIRED FACE MASK TO HELP PREVENT THE SPREAD OF THE VIRUS

Ever since I moved to the Azores I was striv­ing to lead an even more envir­on­ment con­scious life than ever before. I am sur­roun­ded by so much beauty, I simply can­not des­troy and con­tam­in­ate this won­der­ful place. When I got back home to the Azores in early March 2020 there were already some safety meas­ures in place in Europe, but they were nowhere near as strict as they are today with all the social dis­tan­cing and closed bor­ders. Even the price of face masks was accept­able. The reas­on I know this is that for the last 5 years I have always been fly­ing wear­ing dis­pos­able face masks. But once I have seen the photo of all the dis­carded single-use face masks end­ing up as ocean rub­bish and how face masks are now in high demand (and as such are out­rageously priced, if avail­able at all) I star­ted look­ing for alternatives. 
I have always con­sidered myself a very cre­at­ive per­son who loves a good DIY pro­ject, but due to my very busy sched­ule I barely found the time for such endeav­ours. These virus-stricken days unfor­tu­nately I don’t have much to do, so I decided to put this freed up time to good use. There­fore, yes­ter­day I hand-made a machine wash­able, reusable, multi-layered face mask! Lots of people write that home-made masks don’t pro­tect you from the Corona vir­us. Of course I don’t think my DIY face mask is equally good as a sur­gic­al face mask and that it provides a 100% pro­tec­tion from a vir­us that spreads via res­pir­at­ory droplets. How­ever, I feel much safer wear­ing this face mask while out shop­ping and talk­ing to the sales staff. Moreover, this DIY face mask has a felt lay­er (filling) which func­tions as a kind of fil­ter and most import­antly this mask stops me acci­dent­ally touch­ing my face and mouth. So when I came up with the idea of cre­at­ing a DIY face mask I also thought why not mak­ing it a little bit styl­ish and since I live on the Azores maybe it should have an Azores-inspired pat­tern. Since I self-quarantined myself I did not go shop­ping to an arts & crafts store, but used the fab­rics and sup­plies I found at home. 

1. The first step was to find a sew­ing pat­tern. Of all the instruc­tion videos I watched online I liked that of Eniko Mareni the most. So first of all a HUGE thanks to Eniko, for cre­at­ing such a won­der­ful product. I also recom­mend that you check out her web­site and the online clothes mak­ing courses of the Mareni Academy. I wish I had a sew­ing machine! By the end of the quar­ant­ine I could make lots of beau­ti­ful things inspired by this web­site. So the first step is to down­load the sew­ing pat­tern from here.
2. Then I pro­ceeded to watch the instruc­tion video (scroll down for the video), and star­ted to loc­ate fab­rics I can use for this pro­ject. I had a bit of luck: due to a machine sew­ing course I recently atten­ded on Sao Miguel I had scraps of fab­ric at home, even some with hydrangeas. In the video Eniko uses a very spe­cial fab­ric for her face mask, and I tried to find some­thing sim­il­ar. I decided upon using one half of an old pil­low pro­tec­tion bag for the inner side of my face mask. In the video it is men­tioned that felt fab­ric can be used as fil­ter between the out­er and inner fab­ric sides (again, this is not the same as the fil­ter in sur­gic­al face masks, but it adds an extra lay­er), and I clearly must have been on a lucky streak because I also found some felt scraps.
3. I had a 20 cm wide fab­ric which I fol­ded two times. Based on the big­ger pat­tern in the sew­ing pat­tern I cut 2 pieces from both the hydrangea fab­ric and the pil­low pro­tec­tion bag fab­ric. Based on the smal­ler pat­tern in the sew­ing pat­tern I cut 2 pieces from the felt fab­ric (please excuse my sew­ing vocab­u­lary, I am new to this).

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4. Then I hand-sew the double layered fab­rics at the mouth and nose part – accord­ing to the sew­ing pat­tern (with a machine it would have been done in seconds, but by hand it took me quite some time). Then I made a V incision, which will be use­ful when turn­ing the mask out­side in. Then I sew both sides. First I did not under­stand why this step is neces­sary, but oth­er­wise there would be too much over­lap­ping fab­ric in the mouth area, which makes the mask less roomy and also not very pretty.

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5. Then I sew the inner and out­er parts togeth­er facing each oth­er (mean­ing hydrangea pat­terns facing down), except on the side. I turned my cre­ation inside out. At this stage I already knew it will be a very suc­cess­ful DIY.

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6. I finally sew the 2 lay­ers of felt fab­ric togeth­er, and first thought about fix­ing it between the inner and out­er lay­ers. Even­tu­ally I decided to cut it to size and just slip it inside between the two layers.

6. I was look­ing for some elast­ic band but could not find any, so I used 2 pieces of 2x40 cm strips of pink T‑shirt fabric. 
7. I put the ends of the pink T‑shirt stripes inside the mask and sew the both sides of the mask completely.
8. Finally I adjus­ted the length of the pink stripes. The face mask is very com­fort­able, and provides good cov­er for my face, and it also fits very nicely on the nose. The mask can be fur­ther enhanced with a wire rein­for­cing the nose part for a tight­er fit, but I don’t think it is neces­sary as the sew­ing pat­tern is per­fect as it is. 

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You will have much fun com­plet­ing this DIY. Take care of yourselves and oth­ers. Thank you Club Mareni for the inspiration. 

DIY Face Mask by Mareni: https://​www​.you​tube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​_​0​X​p​l​Y​D​e​Ht8

I would love to see your DIY masks based on the video and my descrip­tion. Please let us know your thoughts in the com­ments, and also future DIY ideas (or any­thing, really) that you would like to read about.

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