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Monday, April 6 was National Tartan Day in Canada, but instead of selling handmade shawls and scarves to cruise ship customers on the Halifax waterfront, Maritime Tartan Company founder Sherrie Kearney was using her sewing machine and serger to create cloth face masks.

Kearney was inspired by Canadian chief medical officer Dr. Theresa Tam’s suggestion that wearing a non-medical facial mask could slow the spread of COVID-19, along with the previously prescribed measures of vigilant hand-washing, social distancing and self-isolation.

With business slowed to a crawl, Kearney and her husband Dale decided to switch their operations over to making masks in return for donations for charity and covering shipping costs, wherever possible.

“Dale’s reading some of the requests for masks from people who want to protect their families, and it’s just heartbreaking what some people are dealing with,” says Sherrie.

“You hear on the news that thousands of people are dying, and although we’re not up to those kinds of numbers here, we might be, you never know, although I hope to God not.”

Over the weekend, Kearney, a seamstress with more than four decades of experience, has made 500 masks out of two layers of fabric and two strips of elastic. At the moment, she’s using some stockpiled cotton Canadian flag material and lobster print material combined with an inner layer of flannelette for comfort and absorption.

From Maritime Tartan on Facebook

“There’s nothing fancy about them,” she says with a laugh. “They’re not a fashion statement, they’re just for protection.”

Kearney feels the urgency of the situation personally since she has respiratory health issues and would be particularly susceptible to COVID-19 if she was exposed to it. Over the past three weeks, she’s barely been out of the house, apart from taking the couple’s dog out into the backyard of their home in north-end Halifax.

With a bit of research, she found a design for a mask that would be the most comfortable and safe for the wearer as well as the quickest to make. After making 500 of them, she has production down to a science and averages three minutes per mask which costs about 50 cents each to make.

Once Maritime Tartan Company announced on its website it was devoting its efforts to making facial masks, the company has been shipping them as far away as California and British Columbia, to their regular customer base and those who’ve found out about them on social media.

“You know how it is, you put something on the internet and it spreads like wildfire,” she says. “A lot of it is from a customer who tells their family, and they tell their friends, and so on.”

While Sherrie Kearney works the sewing machine, Dale Kearney keeps an eye on the company’s website and Facebook page and handles the requests for the masks. As a business, Maritime Tartan Company’s traditional trade is now shut down because there are no new orders coming in, but the response to the offers of masks for charitable donations has been overwhelming.

“We just donated $1,000 to a food bank in Cape Breton, and gave 900 brown paper bags to Hope Cottage for the lunch programs,” says Dale. “And we’ve got more orders coming in so there’ll be a donation to another charity coming up soon.”

The Kearneys both acknowledge that the masks aren’t a cure-all that allows the wearer to simply resume their normal lives as before. But they appreciate the advice of Dr. Tam and other health officials that a non-medical facial mask will help prevent the wearer from potentially spreading COVID-19.

“It won’t protect you from getting the virus, you still need to keep washing your hands and avoid touching your face, but other countries have slowed the spread down as more people wear masks in public,” says Dale.

“It just makes sense. If you have the virus and you cough, you’re not going to spread it with a mask on. But you still have to practice social distancing, wash your mask when you get home.”

Between the halt to the tourist season and the loss of orders of products from the Juno Awards and East Coast Music Awards, plus spring weddings and other special events, the Kearneys reckon their company has lost around $8,000 or $9,000 in business this year due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

In the meantime, they can keep busy making masks, providing some comfort to those who need it and support a few worthy causes.

“This is our first year anniversary, so we were planning on having an open house and sales and all that, and it’s all been blown out of the water,” says Dale.

“But we can do that next year, and not worry about it, and now we can help people.”