If you liked my How to Make a Face Mask Out of a T-Shirt guide, you’re gonna love this! Think of that as the starter version and this one is for the pros. As mentioned many times on this site (and many others), we’re in the midst of a global pandemic that has caused a global shortage of protective equipment for our medical workers.

One of the biggest shortages is in face masks, inarguably the most crucial thing to stop the spread of Covid-19. Luckily if you have a sewing machine and some fabric, you can help. The mask you’ll learn to make above is currently being used by multiple hospitals, I know because we made the masks and gave them to healthcare workers via our new project Cover Up Colorado!

You’re going to hear a lot more about that soon but the gist is it’s our mask making and donation non-profit we started last week with our good friends at Winter Session. We organized a network of 175 (and growing!) volunteer home sewers, we give them pre-cut material, they make masks, we give those masks to healthcare workers and people in need—as of this writing have donation requests for 42,892 masks!

I’m working on a series of much bigger pieces about that, we plan to make the whole project open source and reproducible by any and all of you who might want to do the same in your area. And also for you to give us money! Even with all volunteer labor, materials cost us about a buck a mask and we’ve got a ways to go.

(Sidenote: if you run a large healthcare conglomerate and your workers have to ask a denim blogger for equipment so they don’t literally die on the job, you should resign immediately and be forever shamed out of public life.)

But anyways, this video was made with those volunteer sewers’ kits in mind, so don’t be thrown when I mention it. Also, sorry about the auto-focus, it was just me crawling around my apartment with a tripod! Here are those downloadable pieces I mention in the vid:

Make masks, make friends in your community by giving them away, make sure we all get through this together!

UPDATE: In respect for the shortages on elastic in the world right now, here’s a modification on the above video showing how to make a mask with two strips of fabric for ties instead. Happy sewing!