Marlene Terry has been sewing for years. What she loves doing is sewing with scraps of material, like they use to do a long time ago, "in the older days." Quilts were made out of leftover material, and that is what Marlene likes to make; she calls them "Scrappy Quilts." Luckily Marlene has good friends that supply her with lots of scraps of material from their leftovers. She has, over the years, made numerous quilts and other sewing projects from these scraps of material, many of which she gives away.
When she saw there was a need for homemade facemasks, she jumped to the task. Marlene has combined several different patterns to create her facemasks, getting the patterns off the internet. She worked on it because some of the tutorials on the internet only told how to sew it, but didn't give measurements. Another would provide measurements, yet not good directions. At the time of the interview, Marlene has made 14. She will be sending these to the Big Sandy Medical Center, but she is willing to send them anywhere that needs them.
When I asked her what made her want to sew the facemasks, Marlene answered, "I don't know how to answer that. I really like to help people because I know it blesses them, but it also blesses me too." Marlene was a little uncomfortable in highlighting herself in the paper, but I encouraged her to allow me to do so. It is complicated to express what we feel like during this time. Marlene said, "What can you say, it is inexplicable." But, making facemasks is saying something. She feels like she is doing something, not just sitting around doing nothing, but she now has a sense that she is contributing to helping heal the times. By sewing facemasks, Marlene doesn't feel helpless.
She doesn't know for sure who else is making facemasks, although Marlene did mention a few that she thought might be.
In researching homemade facemasks, I discovered that "China now makes 200 million face masks a day - more than twenty times the amount it made at the start of February. The leap has been spurred by the outbreak of a new coronavirus. The masks include the lightweight ones that people like to wear in the hope of protection against coronavirus as well as the heavy-duty N95 masks used by health-care workers." Homemade masks are only about 50% of the protection compared to the N95 masks. They are often used by residence not necessarily by medical personnel. But any mask is better than no mask even for medical personnel who can't get masks because of the shortage.
