The Making of the Mask

There’s a leap between buying fabric and sewing fabric.

Most of us have unsewn fabric that equals the height of the fabric we have sewn.

What we intend to sew is not anything we can ever declutter.

Not wanting to begin this exercise again, I decided to get right at making face masks. I cut out the first five panels, pressed, and sewed them.

Got busy on the liner. And finally got one mask finished.

Along the way, I had been shopping at President’s Choice in Vernon and saw a woman with a very ornate rhinestone embedded braid that went across the top of her face mask.

The word belly dance came into my head when I saw her, though that was the only costuming she had on that would make me think that.

I followed the woman around the store for a while until I got up the courage to ask her where she got that mask.

She said Nolan’s Clinic Pharmacy in the middle of town and that they were going fast. That made me laugh.

Into my head popped the idea that I could hang earrings from the ears of the Lady in Red on my new face masks.

I had just the thing.

A pair of earrings that I could dismantle, each into separate parts, each a small hanging gold piece just the size to compliment the ears of Lady in Red.

Bonnie and I had a disagreement. I thought one earing would do. She argued that symmetry might be preferred by the receiver of the gift.

Bonnie added a second earing to my mask, after my project was nearly finished. Then she took it back off, deciding it needed an extra slip ring, so that it would gently sway as earrings do, with a tilt of the head. That earring slipped off, slip ring not tight enough and so off to the garage for a pair of pliers to secure metal to thread, thread to mask.

Discussion ensued about the theory of sewing, and gifting and learning to live together, some things communal and others not. Bonnie explained that the guilt was starting to weigh her down, knowing she had co-opted an aspect of my project.

And she was referencing what she felt was my own co-opting of her “no” quilt, a story for another blog post.

The first face-mask project finished, I needed a picture. I put on the mask, and Bonnie held the camera. I didn’t know how hard she was working at not laughing, but she finally had to put her camera down. She said, “Arta. You take the picture. I’ll wear that mask. That will help you see what I am seeing.”

We have a COVID-19 bubble of one, and though much is shared, we don’t share used masks.

Unbeknownst to me, Bonnie took a deep breath before pulling the mask over her face, with the plan to hold her breath until she could see that I saw what she saw.

She handed me the camera.

When I went in for a closeup, it appeared to me that the earrings were not earrings at all, but enhanced boogers, one hanging from each nostril. 

“Take that off, take that off right now,” I blurted in horror. “I’m getting my seam ripper, and taking those off before sending the mask to Hebe.”

Laughter no longer suppressible, Bonnie’s hilarity burst forth into the mask, capturing aspirants of long suppressed laughter at the difficulties of theory.

Do you know that laughter that starts at the bottom of your spine, tingling intensifies as it heads up towards your throat. It then takes hold in your stomach and the power builds beyond your capacity to sustain your mask of sacred reverence, the mask you wear for others. It is the volcano erupting on the row in front of you in church, a joke you wish you were in on, but know it is impossible to catch on or catch up.

The laugher splits and takes two roads: one down to test the strength of the kegels, and the other road goes upward, suffocation in the lower throat, yielding both a stomach ache and an explosion of wild laughter, almost manic if it were to be measured, or maybe it would be measure in by the number of tears of laughter.

We tested out our theory that those earrings just weren’t going to work on Dave Wood. He could see that they were not well placed – they looked like nose rings to him.

Yup. 

More to do to get that mask looking just right.

Arta