Decameron: Flying By The Seat of His Pants [IX/2]
wikihow: How to Make a Cloth Mask You Can Wear Outdoors
By Sister Elizabeth O’Connell
Find Your Material
Finding a good material for your mask is a crucial first step. Choose the wrong material and you may end up with an uncomfortable — or, even worse, ineffective — mask.
I recommend choosing men’s pants as your material. If one of your fellow nuns asks you why there are men’s pants in your bedroom, you should simply respond that you’re choosing to prioritize mask quality over anything so silly as “how it might look to have men’s pants on the floor of your room even though you have taken a vow of celibacy and live in a cloister.”
Cut the material according to a pattern
I’ve included pictures of the fabric after following my pattern below. While it may look like the pants were randomly shredded, perhaps to hide evidence that they ever existed, I was in fact closing following what I knew to be the best approach to construct a high quality, comfortable mask when you walked in on me, Agnes.
Sew the pattern pieces together
This is, of course, a crucial part of making the mask. I plan to be making many more such masks in the future. As you should know, sewing machines can be fairly noisy, so assume any sounds you hear coming from my room at the cloister — especially late at night — are mask-making sounds. I’m just doing my part for the community, Gertrude. Stop looking at me like that, Louisa.
Decameron is a newsletter recounting the 14th Century set of quarantine tales for 2020. Read the original story.
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