600 and counting: Alumna puts sewing skills to work to alleviate mask shortages

As the number of COVID-19 cases continue to climb, medical professionals around the world who are on the front lines of combatting the growing pandemic are experiencing a shortage of masks and other crucial personal protective equipment, oftentimes resorting to bringing their own homemade solutions.

Exacerbating these shortages is a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that everyone — even healthy people not working in the medical field — wear some kind of face covering to slow the rate of transmission. Some communities have gone as far as imposing fines for not wearing masks in public.

To help alleviate mask shortages, journalism and public communications alumna Lindsey Viersen is putting her lifelong sewing skills to work by making her own cloth masks to donate. Viersen attributes her valuable sewing ability to her grandmother, who taught her the craft during her childhood summers spent on the family cattle ranch in North Platte, Nebraska.

“My mother-in-law posted a mask template on Facebook, and I’m like, ‘Gosh, I might as well do this. I have a stack of fabric in the drawer, I might as well bust my sewing machine out and do some good,’” said Viersen. “And talking with my friends who are medical professionals, I knew there was a shortage. So out of love, I decided to make some for these guys, at least give them something to feel a little bit more protected.”

Originally from Glennallen but currently living in Sacramento, Viersen began making masks during the evenings as a way to stay creative after a long day of working from home in business development and home schooling her three kids. 

“It has been a really invigorating and inspiring project for me,” said Viersen. “My mind cannot stay idle and neither can my heart, so I needed to find a way to be able to help and give back.”

Planning to make 200 masks, Viersen is now up to over 600 in the span of three weeks and has improved her production time from nine minutes a mask to four minutes.

So far, Viersen has shipped masks to a variety of clinics, businesses and individuals locally and around the country, including to nearly every hospital in the Sacramento area, an EMT team in Colorado, a Ronald McDonald House in New Jersey and to friends back home in Alaska with underlying health issues making them more vulnerable to COVID-19. She also donated masks to a local HVAC business, which in turn donated its supply of medical-grade N95 masks to a nearby hospital.

In addition to making masks herself, Viersen is teaching others how to make their own. She published an instructional video on YouTube and has even begun making house — or rather, business — calls. She recently taught a sewing 101 class to a group of marketing staff for a local in-home health care and hospice company.

Since starting her mask-making project, Viersen has received an outpouring of support in the form of fabric donations, volunteers to help cut fabric and funds to purchase other materials.

“It’s extending out human kindness,” said Viersen. “We all need to be aware and we ought to all be extending in any way we can.”

 

Written by Matt Jardin, UAA Office of University Advancement