 All right guys, hey, how are you? This is a video I never in my well this imagination thought I'd be filming. But anyways, for those who have been following me the last few days on social media, you know that I made myself some reusable masks. Now, for those that don't know, I have asthma and I have some store-bought cloth masks already that I owned. They are used with these PM2.5 carbon filters. When I'm feeling like I'm having a bad lung day or I'm gonna be in a situation where I've got to worry about my asthma and allergies, I do carry one of these with me down. Do I have a head to use them very often? No, not in the recent past, especially since I moved. But now we have this virus thing, right? And I'm susceptible. So that, well, if I've got to start wearing them again, I'd like them to be cute. So I made some of these cloth masks for myself. I found a YouTube video that's not in English with her pattern and I did my best to follow her instructions and create a mask for myself that has this interior pocket that fits my filter. Of course, you would take the plastic wrapper off, but my filter fits in here that I already used and I already have a stash of those. And it would fit in there. I added a little channel for the wire for the nose to get a really tight seal. It's not an N95 mask, but for me, in my opinion, it's better than nothing. I'm no expert. People may disagree with me, but I don't feel comfortable with my lungs being how they are going out in public necessarily all the time without one of these. I'm not going out very often to begin with, but when I do, if I know I have to go out to the shops or something or to a doctor's appointment or something, I'm gonna have one of these on. And if I've got to have one of them on, I thought I wanted to at least look fun. I know the skulls aren't necessarily fun, but they're cool. Anyway, I got a lot of questions after I posted some pictures which I'll insert here of me wearing the masks. How did you do that? What did you do? How did you adapt your pattern? So we're gonna, I'm gonna show you. So you're gonna need a few things. You're gonna need your copy of the pattern which we'll go over in a minute. You will need some quarter inch elastic. Well, some elastic. I have some quarter inch elastic, so I'm using that. You're gonna need some fabric for the outside, something fun. I used just something plain for the pocket on the inside. For the, you're gonna need some 20 gauge wire or something for the metal for the nose piece. I, for that I need pliers and a wire cutter. These are both scissors, pins, tape. This happens to be hockey tape. I like hockey tape. I don't like sports, but we were at a hockey store, I don't know, a couple of years ago now buying something for my future son-in-law. And I was like, ooh, tape. So I have a couple of rolls of hockey tape. So anyway, it came in handy. All right, so the first thing you wanna do is go over to the video. It's P and K Handmade. I'll link it in the description below. And watch her video and download her pattern. Now you're gonna notice right away, I took her pattern and I made it bigger. So my version of her pattern is a little vange, a quarter. Let's see. I put a seam allowance on it too. So almost 12 and a half inches across and it is nine and three quarters inches tall. So I added an inch and a quarter inch this way and an inch and three eighths width-wise. Because for me, the original pattern was too small. Now for the insert for the little pocket, she didn't have a pattern for that. So I went and looked at her measurements and did my approximate best to create that pattern piece for that. And my piece is six and one, two, three, six and five eighths inches tall by seven and three eighths inches wide. Okay? I will include, now the squares on my table, by the way, these are a one inch grid and I'm gonna include the download of a couple of still shots of these pattern pieces so you can get the exact measurements with the angles and everything. But literally all I did was I downloaded her pattern piece, I cut it two ways, spread it out and then taped it down to more paper. It's all I did. And then for this, I just measured out a piece of paper. Okay, so we're gonna take our cotton, we're gonna start with our patterned cotton. This is what's called a fat quarter. It's half of a half of a yard of fabric. I have a lot of these because I use them to craft with and to sew different sewing projects. So these work for this, but you have to cut them out a particular way generally because I don't think you could just do that. Well, maybe you can, let's see. Is it good if you just do that? Oh yeah, it does. So you wanna fold it in half in a way that it'll fit your pattern piece. If I felt folded it this way, it's not gonna fit, it's not tall enough. So I'm gonna cut two pieces of this. I'm gonna pin this down. It's pretty thick paper that I used to make this pattern piece. So I don't need to put a ton of pins, but you put as many as you're comfortable with. Excuse me, that was my stomach, holy cow. So cut out two of this piece out of your pattern fabric. Take something for the inside pocket and you could use the same fabric if you have enough of it. Or in this case, I'm gonna use this white one and cut two of these pocket pieces out of that. I'm gonna do that, I'll be right back. Okay, now that we've got our pieces cut out, two of this big piece and two of the little pocket piece. I'm gonna do some ironing. This camera might get a little shaky because we're literally on top of the ironing board and I'm filming this with my cell phone so hopefully that image quality is pretty good. Okay, so the ironing we're gonna do right now is on the pocket pieces. So you're gonna take your rectangles and you're gonna take the longer way and you're gonna press the sides in. We're gonna do sort of a rolled hem. It's the right side facing down. Push my sleeve up. Now it's going. First I'm gonna press the wrinkles out as much as I can. Some of this fabric's been dropped up in and in for quite a while. Okay, so about a quarter of an inch, I'm gonna fold the edge in and then in again. Again, you've got the shorter measurement of the square, the height going this way and we're folding in the longer two sides. We're gonna just hem them. Do a little bit of a rolled hem and then press. It makes sewing them a little bit easier if you do, and faster if you do this and if you're doing a number of masks, I would just do all the little hems at the same time. There are easier ways to do masks, but I found this one held my filter. I could adapt a nose wire to it easily. And I thought once I worked the pattern measurements out for me, for my Western face, because the girl that originally did this was Asian, that it fit pretty well. So I'll fold these in. So then your two pocket pieces look like this, right? So then we're gonna go to the machine and we're gonna sew down here on both sides on both pieces. We're also gonna take our two big pieces. We're gonna make sure we have right sides together. So in my case, I have to turn the fabric around. We're gonna sew all the way around the edges and we're gonna leave a little like two inch opening at one end, all right? So I'm gonna go do that and I'll be right back. Okay, so now we've sewed our hems on the two pocket pieces down. Both are done. Then we took our big piece and we sewed all the way around, leaving an opening. I use about, for this project, about a quarter inch seam allowance. I use the edge of the presser foot for a gauge for where I want that edge of my seam to be. I'm also assuming that if you're watching this, you have basic sewing skills. Make sure to go backwards and forwards, back tack at the beginning and ending of your seams always. Now we're gonna take this big piece, we're gonna clip our corners off. That way when you turn it, it'll be a little smoother. So just clip off that extra fabric at all the corners. There's some debate about whether you need to wear a mask or not for this new virus, our new reality. But if you're susceptible to this like me and or like me, you have trouble remembering not to touch your face. If nothing else, this reminds you, don't touch your face because you've got a mask on. It is as my niece pointed out to me earlier, best if you wear a mask and goggles. Otherwise you're protecting one mucous membrane and not the other one. So we're gonna turn this right sides out. Yes, she works in the medical profession, just FYI. Okay. So now we're going to, with our fingers, I'm gonna just push out all those corners. Okay, when I'm pressing it open, I'm gonna take the part with the opening right here and I'm gonna push a little bit of the seam allowance in and when I press it, it's gonna be all nice and neat and finished. And then when I sew it, all those raw edges will be tucked inside. We're gonna move out just a little bit so you can see what I'm doing next. So this is the important part. Let's see. Okay, while you're pressing this, you wanna take these two corners and you wanna fold this flap up and press it down. Then you wanna take the two corners up here and take this flap out those corners and press it down. When you're finished, your piece looks like this. So now we're going to take our piece and rent to the machine. We're gonna sew all the way around the edge here. Then we're gonna take our folds and we're gonna sew like about an eighth of an inch down each fold, right? I'm gonna go do that and I'll be right back. When you're done, your piece is gonna look like this. So you've got stitching around, oops, where are we? All the edges. And then you've got your two fold sewn. So now we're gonna lay this out with the little folds sticking up. This is the right side, the outside of the mask. Then we're gonna take our two pocket pieces. We're gonna put this side, this is the wrong side, together and we're gonna center it up here. And you could pin it. I have these little clips, so we're gonna use clips. I think these pink ones came from my friend, Cindy Utter. So thank you, Cindy. You can get them in the quilting section of your fabric store, of course right now because of the COVID-19 shutdown, Amazon or joanns.com. So then did you see what I did? So we pinned it to the top and you'll notice it's shorter than the mask. That's on purpose. So we're gonna bring this down. We're gonna center it on the bottom straight edge between the two corners and we'll clip that. We're gonna do a little bit of a seam, about 1 eighth inch seam up here on both ends. I'm gonna bring you to the sewing machine. So we're gonna sew up here, about 1 eighth inch. Then we're gonna turn it right side out and then we're gonna stitch it again and stitch it down. And then I'm gonna show you how to do a channel for a wire for your nose. We'll turn the iron off so I don't burn myself. All right, let's go to the machine and I'll show you how to do that. Okay, I was talking to y'all and I don't think the camera was on plus I ran out of thread. So anyway, we're gonna sew across here, about 1 eighth inch away from the edge of the fabric. We're gonna go back tack, go backwards and forwards at the beginning and at the end around out of thread. So let's try that again, shall we? Just use a regular straight stitch, nothing too long. I'm at about a three on my machine and that trim all my threads. Let's do the other side. These are washable and reusable and the only thing you have to replace is the filter. You do have to take the little nose wire piece out when you wash it. Well, for me, because I only had jewelry wire, it's not machine washable. So do you see what I'm doing? So then turn it out. Okay, then we're gonna take this part that we sewed and we're gonna just finger press it open, down flat and we're gonna stitch it down. Trimmer threads. Now, if you have a pattern for the outside that has a design on it and has a right way and a wrong way, for this next part, make sure you have it go the right way, like with my skulls. You're gonna pick one of these ends and you're gonna make it the nose bridge and you're gonna sew about a quarter of an inch away, do another seam with of stitching. Yep, I'll show you. So I'm gonna use again the edge of my presser foot plus like a hair, plus like a 16th. And I'm gonna put my presser foot down. Again, I'm gonna go backwards and forwards at the beginning of the end. And I'm basically just gonna make a channel for a wire that I can use to put in the mask to make it fit around the bridge of my nose. The wire can be replaced if it breaks. You can use what you have, but now you have this channel that you can just form it nicely if you put some metal in there around your nose. I haven't yet found anything that's like bendable and metallic and washable. So I made it so that you can still get access to either end of that channel and get the wire out. So now we're gonna sew the other side down. Trim some thread, loose threads here that I'm seeing. And at this stage, this is how your piece should look. I'm going to, oh, as you can see, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take it and I'm gonna fold my edges in like this because you want it like this. And I'm gonna get one of the ones I already made so I can measure it for you because I just keep using it as a guide but I should get a measurement. So when you fold the two short ends in and we make our two elastic casings, your finished mask should be about nine and three eighths inches long from end to end. So we're gonna take about, it's about a half to three quarters of an inch in. Let's see. We're gonna fold it in like this and pin or clip it down. Do the same to the other side. If you're making a number of these like I was, at some point I didn't measure and I just took one that I'd already finished and sort of lined it up to make sure I had something that I was about the same size. The first one you make is gonna be an experiment for you to see if it fits your face and it's the right size. So I would recommend doing not your favorite fabric first and just try it for fit. Now that we have these clipped, we're gonna sew right here on that other row of stitching on both sides, making sure we go backwards and forwards at the top and the bottom. Done with the sewing machine part, you should have something that looks like this. Okay, I'm gonna take you to the table. I'm gonna show you how to string the elastic and how to make the wire for the nose. You will notice on mine that I strung the elastic so that the elastic goes around my head. You don't have to do that. You could just do two pieces of elastic one on each end to go around your ears. I found this way more comfortable than having the elastic around my ears but that's personal preference. Okay, once you have it like this, the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make the nose wire. So I'm going to cut a piece of wire that's about seven inches long. Then I'm gonna go in an inch or so from the end, pull the wire around, make a loop, wrap it around. Then I'm gonna squish that loop. I'm gonna squish that sharp pointy end in, make it as flat as possible, like that, okay? And we're gonna do about, we want the finished one to be about five inches. So we're gonna do the same thing to the other end. Now because this is jewelry wire, it's not gonna last, it's not waterproof. It needs to be taken out when the mask gets washed and then put back in. So to do that and not ruin the fabric, I need to tape those little wrapped ends that we just made. So I'm using some really sticky tape I had, which is this hockey tape. And I'm just wrapping the end and the little sharp cut edge in tape like that. So let's do the other side. My allergies are driving me crazy. Okay, that's too much tape. You don't need a ton of tape. You just need enough for it to stick and cover that little sharp end, okay? Then that goes inside that little channel you made. There we go. So now when you bend it to form it around your nose, it's gonna stay, okay? Now for the elastic. Like I said, I like that it to wrap the whole head. You could just cut two pieces, about seven inches long and you could string them through your two, casing through your two channels and then tie it in a knot or sew the ends together and then you're good to go. If you wanna do one piece ahead elastic, I found for me about 25 inches of elastic works. So I'm gonna cut a piece that's 25 inches long. I forgot to get my big needle. Okay, so we're gonna use this giant needle I have and we're gonna string the elastic up through one side and out the other then, because we're gonna just do one long piece of elastic, then we're gonna bring it around and go in the other side and out the bottom. Then we're gonna take this over to the sewing machine and we're gonna sew these two pieces together. Now, if I'm making this for someone else and I'm not sure how big their head is or in the case of some people, I know how much hair they have. I know some people with a lot of hair, Elizabeth. And then I cut the elastic a couple inches longer and I don't attach it at the end and when they get the mask, they can fit it on themselves, how tight they want it to be and they can just tie it in a knot or they can stitch it together, just FYI. For me, I'm just gonna overlap it about an inch and I'm gonna stitch it down, I'll be right back. Okay, I did see two little rows of zigzag to attach it then I'm going to just pull the elastic until that little part where I sewed it is hidden inside one of the sides and then we're good to go. You have a mask. When you put it on, you put it on this way. This part with the wire goes over your nose, this part you pull it out and it goes under your chin and the elastics hold it onto your head. The one on the bottom goes underneath the ears around the back of the neck and the one on the top goes over the ears. So anyway, again, here are some pictures with me with it on and yeah, mask. Who would have thought that we need to worry about making masks, but anyways, I hope it gives you guys some ideas of what you can do. If you need masks, you feel more comfortable wearing them in public, form your own opinions, do what you feel is safe for you but you should be staying home as much as possible as we are doing here. Washing your hands of course, remembering not to touch your face and if you're not feeling well and you have any slightest idea, you might be sick, stay home. That's the only way we're gonna kick this. All right, that's it for today. Check out the video description for any relevant links and I will link the original video for this in the description below. I do recommend that you go watch her video even though it's not in English, the directions and there are ways to support all of the free content here on YouTube and over in the Facebook art groups. All the creators that I know of have something in their video description myself included, whether it's an Etsy shop or Patreon or a PayPal tip jar or something. So check out the video descriptions on your favorite YouTubers and Facebook creators. We're all in tough times right now but every little bit helps. And the most important thing of course, besides like share and subscribe is to go out and try to have a good day. Do something nice for yourself. Even if it's going out in the backyard and getting some fresh air, you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye guys, stay well.