So it’s going to be some work to think of something good for the happy side of my blog..
I know that Mike, Nick, and I are relatively safe. We are so careful when we go out. Other people may not be wearing a mask and gloves, but we are. Nick hasn’t been out at all and Mike only goes out for exercise. So, I’m the only one running errands. It’s actually hard to talk to people because I feel so awkward hiding behind my mask, looking a bit different than other people, announcing my fear of the virus when other people may have more bravado. No one has said anything yet, but they’re unsociable around me. I am more invisible than I usually am.
But my family and I are relatively safe. We are.
I keep telling myself that. We’re safe until businesses begin to relax and open up.
Right. Looking for good news.
I sewed a bunch of masks. I’m mostly done sewing masks now. I made ten of them. I feel qualified to make masks now. I also feel qualified to make bras and bikini tops. That’s good news, isn’t it? If you need a new bikini top with a pocket for a filter, I’m the one to see.
Plus, I’ve moved on to converting hospital gowns to PPE gowns for nurses. I’m not entirely sure how good cotton is for protection, but they asked me to and I’m doing it. It’s for a nursing home nearby who has had many cases of COVID-19. For every patient they get from the hospital, they ask for fifty gowns. Then, the plan is that I convert fifty short-sleeved gowns for patients into twenty-five long-sleeved gowns for nurses to wear. Actually, I can get more than that because I’m efficient with the material from the gowns I cut up.
It’s Tetris, if you want to know the truth. Tetris is great practice for packing for vacation and for being efficient with the fabric you cut for patterns. I love Tetris.
I had to redesign the pattern too. The last person who was doing this made freakishly long sleeves. No wonder she could only make one gown out of two. I put this sample onto Mike to check and the sleeves were four or five inches long for him.
(It felt like very bad luck to put a gown from a hospital onto my husband, even for modeling purposes, so I worked quickly and got it off of him as soon as I could. I also washed every single gown before I touched any of them even though they said they were just washed. They’d come from either a nursing home or a hospital that was totally infected with COVID-19! I used some good bleach for those gowns and dried them on high to kill germs.)
Mike held his arm out for me and this sleeve fell off the tips of his fingers and hung two inches slack. So, unless this nursing home was staffed by nurses six feet two or taller, I knew I could shorten the sleeves.
The only thing was that when I asked, the nurse I was working with suddenly became dubious of my skills. Then, I had to risk getting COVID by going back to the place I knew was infected and leaving them a freakishly long-sleeved gown and one that I had redesigned to have normal human sleeve lengths. They sent me an email while I sat in the car. They agreed but they also wanted to leave me another likely-infected sample gown. What did I need with another infected gown? They even told me that I could take five more inches off the sleeve length. So in fact, their nurses don’t have freakishly long arms and are not six feet two inches tall.
But that meant I had to redesign the sleeve again. See the width of the shoulder of these gowns is very wide. I had to taper the added sleeve off to a relatively narrow elastic cuff. I didn’t want any of those viruses to climb up into the sleeve and infect their nurses so the cuff needed to be relatively tight.
But that took time, so I lost almost an entire day shuffling back and forth to drop off samples and redesigning the sleeve so that it didn’t have a bump in it where it began to taper off.
See, this has been good for my mind. I spent a lot of time on Sunday solving the freakishly long sleeve problem and not trying to solve the impossible problem of how to keep my family safe from an invisible virus and people who just want to get out of their houses and back to normal.
See, that is relatively good news, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Thank you for listening, jules