Art for Heart

Early Spring of 2020, as the reality of COVID-19 became as real as our very existence, daily news updates kept me anxious. My beauty sleep melted into anxiety-filled restless nights. During the initial wildfire spread of Covid in the U.S., there was a cry for the demand for masks.

Shops quickly ran out of them, leaving people to make their own handmade masks. A group of known and unknown friends joined together over social media (Sew We Care) and came forward to supply handmade masks to the needy. I offered my share of help and made 2700 masks over 10 weeks' time. I have written a separate blog In Odia about why and how about 150 volunteers came along to make a difference by making 25k masks within a short time and how it benefited both parties at the giving and receiving end. Here I have just mentioned in short how I created art with my handmade masks.

No one can motivate you unless you have your own passion and positive energy to thrive. I guess the pandemic unleashed many sides of my personality that I was unaware of. Sewing was one among them. So grateful to my mother who taught me the basics skills. Initially, I used whatever fabric I had but to keep up with the demands, the team requested donations. Shops were closed so people started donating their sheets for masks. Each week I received fabrics to make masks. Within no time the team developed a flow chart of volunteers for drop off and pick up donations. Only a handful of us could sew. But others soon volunteered for cutting, ironing, driving, and delivering to save each other's time.

Trust me, it was like a drug cartel. Not many people knew each other personally but materials to finished products were moving from point A to point B smoothly. Doing this for days was not easy while receiving the sad news of rising Covid cases and deaths every now and then. But sewing on for weeks on end allowed me to perfect my process.

I definitely developed tricks and skills to make sometimes a hundred masks in a day so that I could save a little time for each week to spend with family. I learned to limit my screen time and on rare occasions, I attended zoom hangouts.

While struggling to stay motivated I had an ‘Aha’ moment... what if I arrange my finished masks and make art out of them? Wild ideas started flowing. Each week since then I received different fabrics as if they were different colors for my empty canvas. My wild imagination kept me inspired but they also helped me travel inward as this became therapeutic. This also encouraged other friends to create their art with masks and uplifted each other's spirits.

I was grateful to many unknown helping hands who sponsored fabrics, elastics, and threads because that provided the much-needed fuel for this project. I was also thankful to many who were constantly cutting, ironing, and delivering material to and from my doorstep. Lastly, I was grateful to everyone including my family who had supported me in little ways with their kind words and appreciation.

Here are a few pictures that speak volumes for my Art for Heart project!