1,000 masks and counting: Saskatoon retiree says as long as there’s demand, she will keep sewing

She’s been sewing since she was a teenager, or as Sherry Gizen says: “I’m talking 40 years.”

The 59-year-old mainly retired, part-time Air Canada Jazz employee said it was in March when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Saskatchewan that friends and family began asking whether she had ever considered making facemasks.

“I started looking online to see what other people were making,” she said. “I talked to a few people who told me things that they liked about masks that they’d had before and things they didn’t like.”

So she took a pattern she thought would work and went through a number of prototypes until she came up with a design that she was personally happy with. They feature either two fitted layers with a removable nosepiece, or a three-layer version with a pocket for an additional filter and a removable nosepiece.

“It has kind of been a work in progress,” she said.

Gizen sewed clothes for her kids when they were young, and also makes hand-stitched quilts and does a lot of machine embroidery. She said coming up with the mask design and making them for people was a kind of therapy for her.

“Being off work and having very few hours, it gave me a purpose every day,” she said. “And if I could give something back to people who needed them, then that was a double bonus.”

She doesn’t have an advertising budget, but demand for her masks has come either through word of mouth or from posts she frequently makes on the Prairie Grassroots Maskmakers’ Hub, and the YXE Community Response COVID-19 Facebook pages. Both feature at least a half-dozen local mask makers, with varying types of facemasks for sale and/or donation.

Most if not all of those advertising fabric masks are local sewers whose prices range from $5 to $12 each.

When most businesses in Saskatchewan were closed, Gizen says she was able to continue sewing masks thanks to a stockpile of fabric and supplies she had been setting aside to make some quilts.

It came in handy when demand surged a couple of months ago.

“I’ve shipped masks as far as Kelowna and as far as Toronto,” she said.

She laughs when asked about how many she has made so far.

“How many have I sewed to this point? I’m thinking close to 1,000,” she said. “I actually had days in April where I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t make them fast enough and they were going out the door.”

Since then, demand has slowed somewhat and more big-box stores are also selling them. Regardless, she’ll continue making the masks as long as there’s a demand for them.

“I’ll keep making them as long as people need them,” Gizen said. “There’s no reason not to.”