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WNCAP is delighted to be the current Masks of Love - WNC community partner. The folks at Masks of Love have come together to use their skills and talents to help keep WNC residents safe. Every mask they sell goes to help fund donated masks for both individuals and organizations in our community. Make a donation to protect public health today! https://www.masksoflove.org/
 In a proof-of-concept study appearing online Aug. 7 in the journal Science Advances, Fischer, Westman and colleagues report that the simple, low-cost technique provided visual proof that face masks are effective in reducing droplet emissions during normal wear.
“We confirmed that when people speak, small droplets get expelled, so disease can be spread by talking, without coughing or sneezing,” Fischer said. “We could also see that some face coverings performed much better than others in blocking expelled particles.” Notably, the researchers report, the best face coverings were N95 masks without valves – the hospital-grade coverings that are used by front-line health care workers and surgical or polypropylene masks. But hand-made cotton face coverings also provided good coverage, eliminating a substantial amount of the spray from normal speech. Our masks were designed to provide the best safety level below medical grade masks, and fall within the cotton-made face coverings by addressing several safety categories:
 The Salvation Army Center of Hope provides food, shelter, and other resources to people in need in WNC. Their staff and volunteers serve the public and some of their guests have medical risks - these masks will go to them.
Thanks for your service - to the Salvation Army, and to staff members like Ronnie Burgess serving behind the scenes. #masksforall #buyonedonateone #community #grassroots #masksforsale #828isgreat #asheville  Holy smokes we are in LOVE with this new fitted mask! Not only is it extra comfy with its padded nose bridge and toggled elastic, but it is GORGEOUS! Thanks to Bopha, our super talented sewer, who cranked these out for us!
Www.masksoflove.org #shopavl #shoplocal #maskshop #wearamask #828isgreat #asheville  To say that teaching now is a little different is the understatement of the year! With safety colliding with your job, we have learned from our customers that the juggling job teachers are doing now has become all the more challenging with keeping you safe. While we aren't the safety experts, we do have a few tips from some of our frequent customers are in your shoes to keep you sane and make your life a bit easier in your ongoing challenges with COVID-19.
 Hello Friends,
This is Casey McCully, the Executive Director of Masks of Love. From the inception of this group, we have been dedicated to attempting to help our community and neighbors breathe more safely with our masks despite, race, gender, or socio-economic status. While we set out to protect the citizens of Western North Carolina from Covid-19, the disease has been disproportionately harder on Black communities- a result of long-term systemic health care discrimination. Recently we've witnessed terrible violent racism, leading to the murders of George Floyd, David McAtee, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbury. Now we are reminded that Covid-19 is not the only threat to our Black and Brown neighbor’s fundamental rights to breathe safely. Black Lives Matter. In light of recent events, we at Masks of Love want to do more to acknowledge this critical moment and the need for continued safety and health. We have been block printing a line masks with the Black Lives Matter symbol and we will be selling them on our site. While we usually set aside proceeds from our sales to fund donating masks to our community partners, for this mask, we will be donating $3 from each sale to National Bail Out. “National Bail Out is a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers and activists building a community-based movement to support our folks and end systems of pretrial detention and ultimately mass incarceration. We are people who have been impacted by cages — either by being in them ourselves or witnessing our families and loved ones be encaged. We are queer, trans, young, elder, and immigrant." - From www.nationalbailout.org. Masks of Love has already donated masks to communities such as Hillcrest, Deaverview, BeLoved, and Green Opportunities Kitchen. We aim to continue serving our communities. We welcome hearing from families and organizations in need of masks. We want our Black and Brown neighbors to be treated with respect, to be heard, and to be able to breathe easy because we believe BLACK LIVES MATTER. In Peace, Justice, and Wellness, Casey McCully News 5/19 Masks of Love is growing! We at Masks of Love started this endeavor in order to get as many face masks into WNC as we could in a short time. We did that with the community’s help! We did it with donations of time, money, materials, and skills. Thank you! Those initial efforts put over 6000 masks into our community. Now we looking to the future. Lot’s of us could use a new way to earn money and it looks like we will be needing masks for quite a while. We decided to continue these community efforts in a more sustainable way. … (Drum roll please)… Masks of Love is now offering a “Buy One, Give One” model. For every citizen mask you buy, we will give away a mask to an essential worker or someone in need in WNC. Some of our first Masks in this model will go to the: Buncombe County Schools Migrant Education Program  Masks of Love has also hired a few administrative /logistics people and are currently hiring home sewers. If you are interested in making some extra income sewing from home, here are the basics:
- we are paying $3 per finished Citizen 2 mask - we need commitments of 50 finished masks per week for 4 weeks - we care about quality If this opportunity interests you, send us a message at Masksoflovewnc@gmail.com We hope you will think of us when shopping for masks for your loved ones. We aim to serve WNC and beyond with a high-quality product. We love feedback, feel free to drop us a line! We also will put all proceeds from Mindy the Maskmaker logo sales (coupon code: WNC) towards our mask giveaway program or you can donate directly to that effort. Thanks again for caring about others and the health of WNC! Are you sewing Citizen Mask 1, the curvy, fitted one? Some of these are coming in very small, and I think I figured out why. When you print the pattern, you need set your printer to the landscape orientation, not portrait. Double check the size of your pattern pieces. The bottom edge of A should be 5.25" and the bottom edge of B should be 4.25". The too-small masks will go to pediatric centers and won't go to waste, but please sew the masks at the correct size.
We have plenty of supply bundles at Flora, ready if you are running low. I love to see your kind faces through the glass door! We now have 100 mask bundles as well, for team-sewers and the super-fast! Today at Flora (still our mask drop off and supply location), we got two bins of beautiful fabric donations and even some elastic! About that clear elastic: With elastic in short supply, we’ve had to find a way to make the 1000’s of yards of the clear elastic we have work better. We're sorry if it's been annoying to work with! We have doubled and lengthened it. See the new instructions at the bottom of the Sewers' page. This applies to either Citizen mask design. Hello marvelous sewers and other supporters! First, I want to thank Donna and Greg of Ambrose West, an event and music venue in West Asheville. Ambrose West has opened up their space for our filter-cutting operation, and we will soon use their courtyard as a pick-up location for outgoing masks. It’s heartwarming how local businesses have stepped up to help.
The demand for masks has far outstripped our supply and, as a result, we have had to temporarily halt online orders for Citizen masks. As soon as we catch up on the 6000+ masks now in the queue, we will turn that back on.
We have also made the decision to raise the price on the Frontline masks, to $9.00 each, in packs of 20. This allows us to pay our commercial sewers, providing jobs in our community, as we recapture our overhead and materials costs. The purchase of a Frontline masks helps us provide both Frontline and Citizen-style masks to those in need, without the ability to pay.
Filter questions?Each of our masks comes with filters for the end-user. After research and testing, we've now started to make them out of sterilization fabric, a material used in the sterilization of surgical instruments. Made out of a type of polypropylene, this fabric is affordable, readily available, and has an impressive ability to block virus particles.
When you receive a Masks of Love mask, insert the filter into the pocket between the layers, center it, and open it up flat. You can reuse the sterilization fabric filter by first disinfecting it with heat: remove it from the mask; put the filter only in a low temperature oven, at 165 degrees; and let it "cook" for 30 minutes. Lay it flat while cooling. Sewers do not need to provide filters for the masks they make. We add filters to orders when we ship. For now, filters are not available separately in our online mask store. We have supply bundles a Masks of Love HQ if you need them: Flora, 428 Haywood Road; Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. |
Masks of Love WNCwas created in Western North Carolina in March 2020 as a response to our community shortage of PPE in the face of Covid 19. We created an all volunteer effort to get cloth masks into the hands of those that needed them most. Now, Masks of Love has grown into a business that is providing local jobs while staying committed to our mission of donating masks to our under-served neighbors. We have donated almost 10, 000 masks since we began. Learn more about our community partners here. Archives
January 2021
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