If you can read this, thank a Grandmother.
Two years ago, home sewers were thrust from their cultural backwater onto the front lines of pandemic protection. Moving from invisibility and condescension to essential worker almost overnight was, like so much in the pandemic, shocking but not surprising. We sewists knew our value—but it took a global emergency for the rest of the world to see us as the important community resource that we are.
On March 13, 2020, two days after the WHO declared the spread of SARS-CoV-2 a pandemic, I stopped leaving my house. It’s hard to remember how frightening a time it was. Would the virus kill me, a woman with asthma in her late 60s? Would I get sick if I used the elevator in my building? What if an unmasked jogger ran past me on the street? In those very first days, public health officials were not advocating mask wearing. Viruses on surfaces were thought to hold the most danger, and masks were reserved for front line medical personnel, who desperately needed them. Yet within days it became clear that cloth masks, even bandanas in a pinch, might provide some protection.
Like many older women, I learned to sew as a child, and I pulled out my sewing machine, a gift from my parents 50 years ago. I had boxes of fabric—we sewers call it a “stash,” and it is the raw material for our creations, like a painter having a variety of paints and canvases at the ready. Suddenly my stash was an emergency stockpile, since stores were closed and in any case I was not going to brave the public square. When I first looked online for information on making masks, I encountered a giant void, quickly filled with lots of conflicting advice, ranging from “don’t bother because you can’t make an N95 at home” to “anything will protect you.” I did finally dig up an old study from the H1N1 pandemic. Surprisingly, it showed that t-shirt material performed pretty well, so I got out the box of t-shirts I had been saving to make a quilt and started to cut them up. My first products were pleated, double layered fabric with back-of-the-head ties made of the same material.
The local hospital, critically short of masks, put out a call asking the community to donate cloth masks, so that’s where my initial production run of 20 went. Before long, the hospital had received so many donations, and had begun to get shipments of N95s, that they were able to cancel the call. I shifted to providing masks for family and friends. The first masks my adult children got came from me; likewise, the first masks my stepmother, my aunt, my therapist, my daughter’s roommate, and many others got came from me. Sewing, seen as the province of grandmothers and a quaint holdover from an earlier era, suddenly was a survival skill.
The Centers for Disease Control eventually caught up with us, and on April 10, 2000, issued guidance on the “Use of Cloth Face Coverings to Help Slow the Spread of COVID-19.” I firmly believe that some of us have survived the pandemic because of the outpouring of generosity from many thousands of home sewers in the US. Two organizations that counted cloth mask making within their networks reported a combined total of 10 million produced, and many million more went uncounted. At the same time, groups of makers were creating protective gowns, face shields, nasal swaps and other equipment using supremely versatile 3D printers and the other equipment found in garages and makerspaces around the country. We hobbyists were the first to be able to pivot, as manufacturers worked to retool and negotiate contracts.
Some of the best resources have come from global maker networks such as Open Source Medical Supplies (OSMS), created in March 2020, which hosts a large and growing library of designs for medical equipment, from isolation gowns to ventilators. Although the current pandemic is not yet over, we need to act on lessons learned from the last two years and ensure a robust infrastructure that will support makers like me in the next emergency.
It's hard to remember what those first days of the pandemic were like as we struggled to figure out how to protect ourselves and the people we love. Now every pharmacy, fashion brand, and big box store sells cloth masks in an array of colors and styles, but we under-the-radar grandmothers were there before anyone else. So if you are reading this, you have survived the pandemic so far. Thank a grandmother.