Compassion wears a mask by Helen DePrima & Liz Flaherty #HarlequinHeartwarmingAuthors

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Helen DePrima

God bless all the tireless and selfless women (can men be seamstresses?) who are turning out hundreds of masks to help stem the tsunami of COVID 19 contagion. I’m not one of those. Instead, I’m making masks a few at a time for friends and family who may have trouble laying their hands on well-fitting models which will last through enough washings to get us through this nightmare.

I’m proud of my little-bitty effort which carries a personal bonus: I’m winnowing my 40 year plus stash of quilting cotton. Quilters, like most crafters, I suspect, are hoarders. I have bins of fabric, from yardage sufficient for a king-sized quilt back to fragments no bigger than my hand, too pretty to discard and maybe good for something someday. Today I completed a mask for a teenager who asked for teal and blue. I unearthed a remnant the colors of sea glass, left over from a special quilt I designed to remember my sailing days.

Two small masks went off to Kentucky for a cousins’ sons who haven’t left their yard for three weeks. Another went to Florida for a cousin in her 80’s flying home soon from her winter quarters. I cut two more from the scraps left from a dress made almost 40 years ago for my daughter’s Father-Daughter Dance. I’ve made so many quilts since my first attempt in 1976 but have kept only the nautical one. In sorting through my trove, I remember which fabrics belonged which quilts – the one I sent to college with my daughter, baby quilts for friends’ children, and one which took me twenty years to complete because I no longer liked the colors. I donated that quilt to a charity auction for the Central Virginia Horse Rescue; it sold for $285 , maybe enough for a couple days’ feed or partial payment on a vet bill.

Time to stop reminiscing and start on my next batch of masks. I hope they keep their wearers safe!

by Liz Flaherty

lph Waldo Emerson

When I first started sewing items for hospitals, years ago, I made a few doll-size

gowns, called bereavement gowns, for hospital staff to put on babies who were stillborn or, for whatever reason, didn't survive. I prayed over them, cried over them, and in the end, I couldn't do it. Even knowing it was a gift for grieving parents, I only made that initial few.

Masks are different. I like that the ones I make are from fabric I bought because I loved it. I've been able to remember different quilts when I've sewn them. More often I've used fabric that was an impulse buy on a saunter through a quilt shop. The women around here are sharing their elastic, their ideas--pipe cleaners are good; so are bread ties, just right across the top there--and their time. The masks are a gift--to the wearers and to the people sewing them. They have everything to do with usefulness, compassion, and honor.

We hear from others who are bored with being home, with not working, with whatever unhappy consequence of Covid-19. It is one of the joys of being writers and sewists, isn't it? One of the bigger ones. We are never bored. Or if we are, there's a message in it. If a writer becomes bored with her own story, she knows she's going the wrong direction and needs to turn. If a sewist gets bored, all she needs to do is sew a different fabric or pattern.

Everything else aside, though, sewing masks is a way I can at least feel useful, and I am grateful for that. If the masks keep their wearers even marginally safer than they would be otherwise, I'm grateful for that, too. And now, as Helen said, it's time to start the next batch.