Making your own cloth facemask
Olivia Wilkins
Why should you make (and wear) cloth facemasks?
There is a lot we don’t know about the novel (or new) coronavirus CoV-SARS-2, including how many people actually have it, how many people are asymptomatic (without symptoms) or pre-symptomatic (without symptoms now but will eventually develop them), and the details of how the coronavirus spreads. One question about how to best mitigate spread of the coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, is whether the general public should wear face masks when out and about. (The answer to this question is increasingly “yes;” you can find directions further down in the post.)
Until recently, experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have advised against non-medical personnel wearing facemasks for several reasons. First, there are shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, which are crucial for doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others on the front lines to protect themselves as well as their patients. Second, people who don’t wear masks properly (e.g. touching them) may inadvertently contribute to the spread of the disease. But as Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, noted in an opinion piece published in the New York Times about “why telling people they don’t need masks backfired,” this is a fallacy that when applied to other protective measurements such as hand washing just does not hold up.
“Many people also wash their hands wrong, but we don’t respond to that by telling them not to bother. Instead, we provide instructions; we post signs in bathrooms; we help people sing songs that time their hand-washing. Telling people they can’t possibly figure out how to wear a mask properly isn’t a winning message. Besides, when you tell people that something works only if done right, the think they will be the person who does it right, even if everyone else doesn’t.”
In the U.S., the CDC is now recommending that people wear cloth face covers in public, particularly in places like grocery stores where social distancing is more difficult. Previously, WHO and the CDC recommended that the only people who wear facemasks (besides medical personnel) were those who were sick or those caring for a sick person. But with the prospect of COVID-19 spread being driven in part by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people, there is no way to actually know who is sick. Thus, the idea behind wearing a cloth facemask is not to protect you from infection but rather to slow the spread of disease. Sure, a homemade mask isn’t going to be great at keeping respiratory droplets, thought to be the primary vehicle of CoV-SARS-2, from entering your body, but they will help prevent your own respiratory droplets from spreading. In turn, someone in close proximity to you, like at the grocery store, wearing a mask decreases the chance that they get you sick (and if you do the same, you are less likely to get them sick).
With the growing shortage of medical-grade masks and other protective equipment, some nurses and doctors are so worried about limited supples that they are holding on to used masks, which are supposed to be discarded after use, limiting the effectiveness of PPE. While not a perfect solution, cloth facemasks can provide some protection in the absence of N95s or surgical masks, or they can be used to cover medical-grade masks and extend their lifetime by acting as a washable and reusable first line of defense for particles, potentially lessening the extend of contamination for PPE.
About two weeks ago, my husband wore a homemade cloth mask to the grocery store, and the cashier thanked him for wearing a mask. So again, even if wearing a homemade cloth facemask won’t protect you directly, it can help protect the essential workers who can’t social distance due to the nature of their jobs but are working so you can have food on your table. You can also help more vulnerable people in your community, like older folks and immuno-compromised people, by slowing the spread of disease.
How to sew your own pleated facemask
If you don’t have a sewing machine or don’t want to sew a mask by hand, you can also make a facemask out of a bandana.
There are numerous designs floating in the interwebs for homemade cloth facemasks. The pattern I use is modified from an existing pattern for a pleated face mask with a pocket for a filter. I’ve made some slight adjustments, which I’ll explain as I go.
Materials
1 - 20 cm x 44 cm piece of cotton fabric (the tighter the weave, the better to help minimize transmission of particles); alternatively, I use a 20 cm x 46 cm piece from a fat quarter to lessen the amount of cutting I have to do and just incorporate the extra fabric into the hem
2 - 4 cm x 8 cm piece of cotton fabric for the tabs that hold the elastic bands in place
2 - 25 cm strips of 1/4-inch elastic band (if you can’t find elastic band, hair ties or ribbon can also work!)
1 - ~10 cm of wire (an unfolded paper clip works; I’ve been holding on to twisty wire from my son’s toys’ packaging just in case I ever had a use for it, which I do now!)
About 20 pins for holding pleats and pieces in place
Sewing machine (or needle) and thread
Ruler
Directions
Cut all of your fabric to the sizes listed above and fold the hems. For the main part of the mask, double-(or if using the full length of a fat quarter, triple-)fold 1 cm on each end, leaving you with a 20 cm x 40 cm piece of fabric. For the two tabs, single-fold 1 cm on each end to give you 4 cm x 6 cm tabs. You can sew the hems, but I use tacky glue to hold them down because it is faster and easier (and just as effective); you can also just pin the hems in place.
Mark your fabric with lines indicating where folds will go. I made a template using a piece of cardboard from a box that was going in the bin (yay reusing and recycling!) so I didn’t have to measure each time. A picture is shown below.
My pattern on a piece of cardboard with top centimeter marked for hem double-fold. At the bottom of the hem, a line with A is marked. There are a total of 12 marks (10 letters, A through J, and 2
"FOLD” marks), and they are separated as follows: A - 3 cm - B - 1.5 cm - C - 3 cm - D - 4 cm - FOLD - 3 cm - E - 3 cm - F - 1.5 cm - G - 3 cm - H - 1.5 cm - I - 3 cm - J - 2 cm - FOLD
Make the pleats in your fabric by folding the fabric at B and bringing the pleat up so that B meets A and pinning the pleat in place. Repeat this so D meets C, F meets E, H meets G, and J meets I for a total of five (5) pleats.
Pin the pleats in place.
Once all of your pleats are pinned in place, it’s time to insert your tabs. Fold the two tabs lengthwise (so that they are 2 cm x 6 cm each). I recommend turning the large piece of fabric over and pinning the tabs in place onto the right side, rough edges out and one on each side, such that the bottom of each tab lines up with the fold in the bottom pleat in the middle section of the fabric (i.e. that which corresponds to the fold between I and J). The original pattern says to line these pieces up in the middle of this section, but I kept sewing one end of the tabs shut; shifting them down a bit so the bottom of the tabs are aligned with the bottom pleat has fixed that problem for me!
Place the tabs. Notice how the bottom of each tab is lined up with the bottom pleat on the “right” side of the fabric.
After pinning the tabs in place, crease the fabric along the FOLD lines. Making sure that the wrong sides are facing outwards, fold down the side with two pleats (i.e. with markings A through D) first, then fold up the side with no pleats. That is, the side with three pleats (the middle section) should be on the bottom and the non-pleated side on top with the two-pleats side as the middle layer, again with the “wrong” sides (or sides with markings) facing outwards.
Using a ruler, make sure your mask is the same breadth of about 9 cm across. Adjust the folds as necessary, keeping the pleats as even as possible.
Have the pocket opening oriented toward the top of your folded fabric.
Sew your mask along one of the short edges, starting on the side without the pocket opening, giving yourself about 1 cm between the stitching and the raw edge (I just keep the side of my sewing machine’s foot aligned with the raw edge). Leaving about 0.5 cm on the long side where the opening is, sew across the long edge (making sure you don’t sew the pocket shut like I did on my first mask… oops). Finally, sew down the final short side.
With the orientation shown in the picture above, sew the left side (starting at the bottom left corner), across the top, and down the right side.
Once you are done sewing, insert your piece of wire into the 0.5 cm gap between the seam and the fold along the long edge of your mask.
Turn the mask inside out so that both pleated sides, and the tabs, are on the outside. Inspect to make sure that your tabs are secure. If necessary, turn the mask inside out and sew over the edges with the tabs to make the sides of the mask even.
While you can sew the elastic bands to make your mask’s loops, I recommend tying them so they can be adjusted, especially if you are donating the masks.
Once you’re happy with the mask and it is right-side-out, it’s time to add the elastic band. Most patterns say to feed the bands through the tabs and sew the edges together to make a loop, but I recommend tying the ends together so that you can adjust the size of the loops as needed.
If you’d like, you can even embroider the top pleat, which is about 3 cm wide, on the front of the mask for a personal touch! For example, I embroidered some things from my research (the ALMA telescope and the Orion constellation) on mine :)
When using the mask, be sure to wash after every wear, and don’t wear when damp. For added protection, you can also add a filter - like a coffee filter or toilet paper or paper towel to the pocket.
The finished product!
While I’m making masks to donate, I’ve set aside a few in my shop that I can customize. Any money from masks will help me buy more fabric (so I can make more masks!).
Making a mask out of a bandana
If you don’t have the means to sew, you can also use a bandana or other piece of fabric to make a no-sew version.
Take a bandana and fold it over on itself three times equally. You can add a makeshift filter in the middle if you’d like. You should have a folded piece of fabric that is one bandana by one-third bandana long.
Take rubber bands or hair ties and put them around the bandana so that they separate the bandana roughly into thirds. Fold the outer sections in and tuck under the rubber bands.
Now you have a facemask! Just slip the rubber bands over your ears and you are good to go!