Masks! We made masks.

I say ‘we’ because I have a wonderful seamstress who can sew a straighter line than I can, and she’s been sewing my ideas through the pandemic and well before. Sam has a dog named Tofu and thinks all of my ideas are great, even the craziest of ones.

I have a mix of patches leftover from a big silkscreen run I did with the Hive Printing mid-2019. I laid out 10 different images on a file to be screened onto a piece of fabric, we made 10. We had 100 patches and right now I think we have about 10 left. Some of them are really big so these 3 were the best choice for masks. I like seeing graphics on T’s and why not on masks. It makes them fun because let’s admit it wearing it is really freaking weird.

We were surrounded by smoke from forest fires last summer so a handful of people were wearing them. I have asthma so my Mom, called from Nova Scotia was hoping I was ok and wearing one. I made it through that season without an asthma attack and I didn’t wear a mask.

Now we are stuck in this pandemic that seems to have created some kind of division between those who are choosing to wear a mask and those who are not. There are Facebook groups, marches, and schools of thought for each. I am wearing one mostly out of respect for others. I was wearing a surgical one while working at my part-time gig with a “Love” sweatshirt and some guy walked right up to me and said ‘Love and Fear do not co-exist’. He was not wearing a mask, so I told him I was working and then cussed at him.

In this current season of mask-wearing, I thought it would be cool to create some with some ‘patches’ sewn on the front.

So we are divided and I’m ok with wearing one. It does feel weird but I will take the feeling of cloth on my face feeling weird over being intubated because I need help breathing. Some provinces are making them mandatory in inside places. I say make them part of your look, I have 3 left and you can buy one from me for $25. You can pick them up at a safe social distance here in Vancouver or I can mail you one for a flat fee.

This time and space have given me the ability to be wildly creative, my mind works like that on a daily basis, now I have been given that time to execute these ideas. This one I am kind of proud of, there are others I am just as proud of. I just like the way these ones feel, to me because they are soft and they are telling a story of a photo I took on someone’s face. So it’s kind of like a real live mural I created.

I want to make buckets, sounds weird eh but wouldn’t it be cool to have a ripstop fabric bucket to throw stuff in? It goes with my rain cape and day pack ideas which came to life last year. So this year we are in the tail end of lockdown, an intensely creative time for me I thought about carrying around all of my shit in a bucket.

So stay tuned, for buckets.