How to sew a reusable face mask - Quick and easy tutorial with Billette's Baubles

So the first supplies you need from your stash are two pieces of fabric, one that you intend to use for the back so to speak, it's reversible so you know you can do it however you want, but let's just go. to call this the front back piece and then you also need a piece of flannel, the flannel measures seven inches by four and a half inches and the front and back piece measures nine inches by 7 inches and then you need two pieces of elastic like this. Today I'm using a 1/8 inch which I think fits nicely behind the ear.

You could use a 1/4 if that's all you had and you didn't have a lot of financial freedom to go out and go crazy. you just want to use what you have that might work, but I really like the 1/8 inch that seems to work around the ear, so you have 7 inches here for your elastic and then what we're going to do is take our flannel. The nice thing about flannel and cotton is that they stick together so you don't even have to pin it down, you just get everything if you're making one then great, but I'm still talking like you're going to make one. a whole stack of these so you just put them in there and it's not going to come off you see it's going to be okay and then you take it to the machine and you sew it here and I'm going to take this top piece with our flannel to the sewing machine.

I'm just using a 3.0 stitch length and I'm taking it

easy

, it's not a race and then when I get to the end I just lift the presser foot and the needle and just No, I'm going to leave the threads tied, I'm just taking it out a little more than necessary and I place it here on top and do it again no need to sew back on either end okay now we have our core attached to what we'll call our top fabric and I'll take my scissors and I'm going to go ahead and cut all these extra threads so it's nice and neat, that's the key to good sewing and having the turnout of a project the way you want is just being able to have nice, crisp lines and having all the threads out of the way and then the next part will require us to sit in front of the sewing machine, this is what makes it really enjoyable. if you cut a bunch of your blouse and back our fabrics and sew all of this and then because basically you're going to be sitting in the machine putting in your two pieces of elastic and it's going to happen very

quick

ly so let's go back to the Machine and I'll show you how to do that .

We're going to want to take the backing fabric pretty side up and the top fabric that has the flannel pretty side down and you're going to gather them together and line them up as best you can you can pin them for this actually you know what for this video, I'm going to go ahead and throw some pins out here just for maybe a few of you. who want to donate them somewhere or maybe make them for an older family or just for whoever you're doing this for. If you're a beginner, it's good to have good sewing habits, so for now I'll just put those two. pins and just to pin them all here at the nine inch end, you want to leave probably an inch to an inch and a half gap and that's going to be your start and stop point, okay, so when you get to your corner here you want leave about 3/4 inch or an inch before the edge you don't want to sew all the way to the edge you want to lift the presser foot with the needle down very important you have the needle down and all you have to do is open the fabric like this, under the presser foot , grab one of the elastics and you will place the elastic inside the corner, so now the corner of the elastic meets the corner of the fabric and then you place This top fabric goes back down, turn the fabric like it was originally and continue and sew it closed, you know, almost to the edge, and give it a little back stitch and then come back to this position, okay, I forgot to mention what I'm using. probably 1/4 inch, maybe 3/8 inch seam allowance here on the edge, it's good that you don't want to get too close to the edge here and I feel like 1/4 to 3/8 is a good measurement, so now we are in the corner and our needle is down and we have turned the corner and now we are going to continue until we reach the next corner.

One thing I will mention is that I want to make sure that your elastic is not in the way of your needle here, okay, so I'm going to move it out of the way, so same thing now we're not going to put a new elastic, we're not going to put that second. elastic now we're taking the elastic that's attached to our first corner and we're going to move on. Sorry guys, I know my hands are in the way, but I didn't do it. I don't have a special tripod for filming. this in a different way and then the top of the fabric again, continue with the back stitch, go back to 1/4 inch or 3/8, let's say 3/8.

I think it's more of creating and getting those bowel movements, okay, now below. We can't see it here, but now we have our first elastic that is attached. If you guys, I'll mention this if you don't have your elastic perfectly in this corner, it's okay, don't freak out about it, it's okay, just put it on. as close as you can in this corner as long as, but most importantly, as long as it's sewn tightly so it doesn't come off, it will have multiple uses, it will be washed and reused, so just put your elastic in there and just sew it back , but if it's not in the corner, it's okay, don't panic, it's okay, so now we're on our third corner.

Same thing I'm going to go ahead and remove this pin when I put it in there and I'm going to open this up. I'm going to take our next elastic here. I'll put it in that corner number. It doesn't have to be perfect. The corner is ideal. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's okay, sew backwards or turn around. to a three-eighths salvage edge, leave the needle down and then we'll go to the fourth corner and do it again, okay, now we have the elastic sewn on the second side here, so here's our stitch where we start and we go to sew up to here until we leave, maybe like an inch and a half, okay, so now let's put our machine aside, grab our scissors, let's cut the threads out of the way. in our opening here and then what I'll recommend is that you come in and just trim off the corners that you don't want to hit your seams, remember we did some back seams there so it could be that.

It went into the corner everything, but you know, deal with it, you just don't want a lot of volume here in the corners, it's fine all the way around and if you feel like there's any, you know there's a lot of Salvage. here for some reason you can go ahead and crop that too, this actually looks pretty good. I'm going to trim this flannel a little bit here on the edge, okay, that actually looks pretty good, other than the scraps, okay, so it's construction. It's practically finished and you guys did amazing. Let's open it up and see what it looks like, so this is basically what it's going to look like before we start pleating it.

Align everything very well. It's going to have that opening here, so just. Move the fabric and bring it to where they match, okay, now we're going to iron this and I'm just going to grab a piece of fabric to use as an ironing board. I'm going to place this. I'll pass, that's some steam. I wouldn't let this sit on the elastic for too long, but you can go in there and you just want to get a nice finished edge, the key to a good seam is I ironed things out and then I also ironed this little hole here where we had turned it inside out or of the right.

I have to say okay, so now here's what we're going to put on this, we're going to put pleats on this and you can fold it like this. way and iron and then quarter fold again and iron and use your lines however you know you can try this and you can work with it. I'll just show you how I do it because I'm usually pretty. I'm a perfectionist about things, but I've been able to observe this and it's not a big deal, so I'm going to bring the pins in now, basically what I'm going to do is about two and a half years. inches down and I'm just using my fingers to do a manual crease and then I just put my head on it and look at it looks pretty good.

I throw a pin here from one side like this and another pin. over here like this and then I'll do one more okay so I'm looking at it and if I don't like it you know the length here the length here I can always do this actually this is a little short now that I'm saying that look at it okay and I'll do it again here. I'm going to do one more here. I'll just look at it and do it like that, nothing more. Okay, let's give this a good iron to iron out those creases, then I just put my head on it and look again, it looks pretty good.

I'm going to go ahead and pin it again, okay? now i have it so you can see how wide this is here now this is what i learned about

face

mask

if the pleats are too wide if you don't have enough pleat like you would think it's going to be make this not fit you if you do too thin, you know if this is if this is instead of being so wide if it's smaller like this, but you'll actually have like a gap on the side of your

face

like when you put on the Mask, put it here, you'll have a gap, maybe Maybe I can insert a picture here to show you and you don't want that space, so it doesn't matter how small you know or how intense you are. your pleats to make this side smaller because once you fold it it will fold over your nose in your mouth so that's okay that doesn't matter but I found that the tighter you have your pleats here the better it will be to not have a hole . there on the side of your face, okay, so again, let's put our fake ironing board here and our

mask

and we're just going to get a little bit of steam in.

I'm just putting a good pressure on this to make it a lot easier when we're going to sew it, okay, there we go and now it's time to sew all the way around the edge and what we're going to do is find where our hole is, which is right there, and we're going to Start here in our hole and what we want to do is make two points around the mask and what I mean by this is make it sturdy so you can wash it multiple times. You could do just one if you wanted. If you're short on time or you just don't want to have to do a second one, that's totally fine, but I really recommend that you do a double stitch so you can see here that I have a stitch that goes. all the way out and then I also have one in there like maybe 1/4 inch no it's not even smaller than that like 1/8 inch right next to it okay so I trim our threads on Al principle, they can even pressure it if they want.

I hope you enjoyed this

tutorial

a lot. I know there is a need for these masks in our country right now, so by making them or donating them or, you know, charging a small fee for them, you can help in some way. I'm sure there are people around you, older people or just people you know, who could really benefit from this, it's not just about I'm not going to say what it's called because I just hate it, I'm tired of hearing it, but let's call it just the new flu that's floating around, not only could it be used for that but also for gardening or landscaping, if you're working with something specific that you really want to safeguard. your family is against you, you just have to stay away from your breathing, so anyway I hope you enjoyed this

tutorial

and I'll see you in the next video sometime, bye.