Old Masks: New Life

Last year, when the CDC told us that cloth masks no longer work, I gathered all the masks from around my house and put them into an old tote bag which I then chucked into my garage. All the masks meant something to me. At the start of the pandemic, I collected fabric from friends and family to sew masks. In all, I sewed over 500. I shared them with community groups and with my family members all over the country.

As I gathered the masks from the various baskets around my house, I saw an old shirt my friend had given me, a tablecloth a neighbor had donated, and scraps from a quilt I had made for my daughter. “I wonder how many people are in the same position,” I thought to myself, “throwing away all of these memory masks.”

I hate throwing things away. I always see an alternate purpose — ties from the grocery kale can be used to tie up the snap peas in the summer. Plastic takeout containers are perfect for reusing to deliver cookies to the neighbors. I’ve recently repurposed the metal cans that raisins come in as holiday candy tins by gluing magazine images around the sides.

A few days after I’d collected all the masks from my household, I posted a neighborhood notice asking if anyone else had cloth masks they were getting rid of. I shared, “I have a project, but I’m not sure what it is. If you have any cloth masks to donate, please DM me.”

Within days, I had hundreds of masks. It was delightful to drive around the neighborhood and pick up sacks of colorfully patterned masks. I could tell right away a little bit about who lived in each house. There were tiny kid masks, superhero masks, masks with cat-eye sunglasses patterns in purple and orange, serious sports masks, and masks configured in every style. There were double paneled masks, masks with an insert for a filter, masks with ear loops and whole head straps.

First, I washed all the masks. Then I had to remove all the elastic straps and wire nose pieces in the hundreds of masks I’d collected. Then, because the masks had been through the dryer, I had to iron them all. My hope was that spending time with the pieces of fabric would give me an idea about what to do with them. 

I wanted to make something symbolic, something to memorialize “the end” of our mask-wearing days. I contemplated making a quilt, but that idea became overwhelming as I started unstitching the masks and realizing that there was no uniform size to the various rectangles I’d collected. I thought about a big flag, but that posed a similar problem to the quilt.

Then it came to me. I’d make a mask version of prayer flags. Once I had the idea, a vision came together. Many of the masks had hand-sewn straps that could serve as the strings that attached the separate squares.

I sorted the squares by size and shape and carefully selected 15–20 masks per strand, which I then laid in twenty piles across my dining room table. Then I spent hours matching random strings to piles and pinning the masks to the strings. 

Once satisfied with all the sets of flags, I went down to the basement and did the final stitching of all the strings and squares on my sewing machine to complete the twenty sets of prayer flags. I felt a swell of happiness to be repurposing these masks that symbolized one of the hardest two years of my life.

Over the course of creating these flags, my vision of what to do with them clarified. I wanted these flags to make other people as happy as they made me. I decided I would hang them on the chain-link fence at the public playground on a busy street a few blocks away from my house. 

I recruited my partner, my daughter, and her friend to walk over to the park after dark and string them up along the fence. It took about an hour to do, all of us working side by side, negotiating the placement of each string of flags. Once they were all hung, we stood back, satisfied.

I went to bed excited, waiting for morning when dog walkers, kids going to school, and adults making their way to work would see the flags and smile. I imagined them feeling the swell of relief I felt, knowing that these masks were now on a fence as a piece of art instead of on their face.

But the next morning my daughter’s friend called me frantically as she was driving to school. “Laura,” she said, “someone is cutting your flags down!”

I raced over to the park where a parks department employee was cutting the flags off with heavy shears. “These are mine,” I said to the woman. “I hung these last night. They’re mine.”

She was kind, but firm, “you can’t hang these here,” she told me, “it’s against park policy.”

The flags were wet from dew and the parks department employee had destroyed a few strands by cutting them off. For the next hour I painstakingly untied the knots that held the flags to the chain-link fence. Demoralized, I took all of flags home and strategized about what to do with them. A few weeks later, around Halloween, I tried to hang them along a wall near my house, but the bamboo poles I had were too short. It didn’t work. 

I’ve contemplated stringing the prayer flags between trees in the park or across benches along the lake, but I haven’t done it yet. All the flags are sitting in a box in my garage. I pass by them every time I need to get extra toilet paper or a hammer. 

Last week, the WHO declared that COVID-19 crisis is officially over. I wonder if the moment has passed, if the prayer flag masks won’t mean anything to anyone anymore, if the post-COVID celebratory moment is gone. Maybe. For now, the masks will stay in my garage. I don’t want to throw them away. Even though I wasn’t able to share my vision, the prayer flags still represent a beautiful moment of liberation and joy for me.