With COVID-19, one of the first arts & crafts projects I decided to pursue was, of course, face masks.
I had a brief sewing phase when I was in high school and would hand-sew my own pencil cases and pouches for fun. Back then sewing machines were too intimidating and I did everything by hand. Fast forward to 2020 and I still felt intimidated but with living with my senior citizen parents and my 101-year-old grandmother, we needed masks badly and it was time for me to just learn it. Thankfully, after many late nights and YouTube videos, I got it down!
I wish I had taken more photos to document my sewing progress but here’s what I have:
The first photo shows me practicing how to sew in a straight line. For some reason that was really hard for me. My first masks were made from cut up pillow cases from the 90s that I found in an empty bedroom closet. Eventually I got brave enough to work with nicer patterned fabrics and got familiar with top stitching to give the masks a more finished look.
And, because I love my dogs so dearly, I drew them and created a repeating pattern of them to be printed through Spoonflower. Creating this pattern was my first attempt at surface design and I'd love to try my hand at more patterns in the future. I made the drawings in Procreate and used Adobe Illustrator to place all the elements together to create a seamless pattern.
I used this fabric to sew a case for my Nintendo Switch.