Hello and thanks for dropping by. I’m a maker based in Newcastle upon Tyne and I began making masks in late March 2020.

I agonised over whether I should for a couple weeks before facing my fear of the sewing machine! As the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak gained momentum in the UK, I read all the science I could to try to understand what was happening. I was also perturbed by a rise in vocal racist abuse directed at East Asian people here in the Toon. I figured it wasn’t without good reason that people from countries that had been hit hard by earlier epidemics such as SARS were in the good habit of wearing masks. It was partly out of solidarity as well as being convinced by the evidence in favour of safe and appropriate mask-wearing that I decided to try to do something to help.

It was a rocky start. I watched countless YouTube videos detailing many different designs and it was overwhelming. I was rather a novice sewer at the time. I hadn’t really learnt sewing in a formal sense before my partner’s mum (a retired HE teacher who’s now a textile artist) showed me the basics of quilting and gave me a box of fabric scraps and kit to get started. She also gave us her old sewing machine, one of the earliest computerised models. This was back in December 2018, and while I got into the quilting and hand-sewing easily, I was dubious about the machine.

But back in March as things were clearly getting serious and I wanted to cover my own face to feel safe while running errands, I decided to put the materials to use. And boy did I struggle with the machine. It was so much trial and error and pouring over the manual and stopping to look up sewing terms and names of attachments and functions that weren’t in my vocabulary. I spent a whole Friday late in March battling away with it all and felt battered and dejected with the what felt to me like abominations I’d created. I took a few days away from it and by the next week I realised my test masks weren’t all that bad. The problem was none of them allowed for my glasses, and I knew then that was the part I had to focus on; if they work for glasses-wearers, they’ll work for anyone.

By mid-April I was happy to share my experiments with my local mutual aid group and began distributing packs to people running errands for people shielding and in quarantine, and really anyone who requested any. In May, a friend asked me for some and was so taken with them that she insisted on paying me and encouraged me to make them for sale. I’m a rubbish capitalist, so I eventually started taking pay-as-you-feel donations.

With people’s generosity, I was able to get kitted up. I vastly improved my design based on feedback and my own wearing. I learnt about interfacing and read studies demonstrating the effectiveness and increased safety of three layers rather than two. To reflect the amount of time and labour this research and the making take, I try to ask for amounts that reflect a living wage. My pricing does not currently include materials as they have been given to me, and I try to strike a balance between making the masks affordable while trying to get a fair amount for my work after all the fees are removed.

I am still happy to provide masks for free to people in need who cannot afford to buy them, and have supplied dozens to the North East charity Action Foundation for their clients. Donations and sales help me to continue doing that.

Thank you for reading my story. Please do get in touch with any queries. I do also make masks for children, but mostly on request, so ask if you need them. Be safe!

Paula