Hi everyone,

Hope you are all keeping safe and well in this challenging time.

I have been silent for a while as I was busy making some homemade facial masks with fabrics. I want to share with you the result of this activity, in case some of you would find it useful. First of all, I need to highlight that I am aware and you should too that this is the last resort to be used when other masks are not available.

The advantage of having a cloth mask is that you can wash it in the washing machine. The masks I made have three layers of fabric, and they have a pocket inside which you can place a filter. I did research a bit and found endless tutorials to construct a DIY mask. At the end of this research, I mainly followed this one, with some changes.

I followed its instructions only for the templates and the basic constructions. Here what I changed from this tutorial:

I inserted elastic bands that are going to be placed behind the ears to hold the mask in place, instead of using the ribbon ties as they are cumbersome and slippery, so I found them less efficient.
I didn't put a wire inside a channel at the top of the face mask as I'm not sure that it won't oxidate or making holes when washing the mask.
I used size S and M (the L is huge), and I made myself an extra-small template as the S is too big for children. The length for each elastic band I used was 14.5 cm for the adult masks and 12.5 cm for child ones.
As is impossible to get the filter suggested in the tutorial, I made it using the waterproof puppy training pad holder. Each mat measures around 60x60 cm (it depends on the brand you get), so from one mat you make have many filters.