Laser Cutting Entry 17 - Cutting Facemasks for Hospitals

It has been nearly a year and a half since I made my last "Laser Cutting Entry". I thought I'd take a moment to describe what myself and my wife are doing amid our coronavirus19 lockdown/social distancing. The local hospitals are asking for "outer" masks to be manufactured. While these are not surgical quality, apparently an outer mask like this worn over an N95 will enhance the life of the N95.

Here's my wife's sewing setup with a few nearly completed masks awaiting elastic straps to be added.

Here's a video of cutting a mask panel. I simply use the stock LaserDRW software to cut. Settings: Speed = 40 mm, and Power = 20%. Much faster than cutting them out with scissors, it takes around 10 seconds to cut out a panel.

Recommended fabric: cloth baby diapers, or any other similar washable 100%, cotton tight weave material. If you want, to add color, add an extra layer of fabric over the cloth diaper.

There are 4 panels to the mask, two larger outer panels, as in the video, and two slightly smaller panels for the inner side. These masks need to be 100% cotton so we scrounged some old fabric we had lying around for the outer panels. For the inner panels or liner, we used some miss printed t-shirts I has lying about from my screen printing endeavors.

Rather than list the directions here, and files to cut, I'll list the links From Craftpassion.com that I went by.

Both the directions and patterns are here (Scroll down the page for the Cricut SVG patterns): https://www.craftpassion.com/face-mask-sewing-pattern/#face-mask-pattern