Masking

Because of everything (and if I try to explain it more than that, I'm going to get off track way too quickly), we are no longer allowed to wear cloth masks to work. (Well, we can so long as we wear a surgical mask under it.) 

From what I've been hearing on the news and such, we really should just have schools go virtual at this point. But no. Let's allow everyone to catch this virus by keeping everything open and pretending that we have adequate mitigation measures in place. Which we don't. 

Like I said, this'll turn into a diatribe if I start, so let me get back to what I was going to talk about...

The thing that was great about my cloth masks was that I had knitted the ear straps, so they didn't irritate my ears. Alas, the kn95s I have have elastic ear straps. And after one day wearing them all day, I realized that was not going to work. 

But, if you recall from the early days of the pandemic, a solution was found for the irritating ear issue. Button bands. 

So, I made one: 

I wore it the next day. And... it was a bit too long. 

This was eight inches long, long enough to almost reach to my ears along the back of my neck. But, it didn't pull the elastic taut enough for the mask to fit snuggly on my face. All day it felt like my mask was slipping off my face.

Well, not all day. I gave it up as too loose and put the elastic straps back on my ears.

Then that evening, I made another one: 

It was half the length at four inches: 

And that seemed to do the trick. 

It pulls the mask elastic taut enough so that it stays on the face (although it still pulls it down so that I feel like I have to adjust the mask frequently throughout the day). 

But, before with the straps on the ears, I felt like the mask was pulling up into my eyes all the time. 

It's a small price to pay. I'd rather wear a mask and avoid the 'Rona as much as I can.

It's a simple knit. (You could also use fabric cut to the right length and just attach buttons. But I knit, so it had to be knit.) I used stuff I had in my stash. Those are "vintage" buttons. The yarn was Caron Simply Soft. It's on the lighter end of worsted weight.

I cast on 15 stitches (using size 8 needles), and I worked something like 8 rows (I didn't count; I just knit until it was wide enough) in garter stitch (I knit every row). The buttons were sewn on about two stitches in from the side. 

That's more for me. I find when I do something simple like this, I don't write down what I did, and later, when I want to replicate it, I have to start from scratch. By writing it in the blog, I can refer back to it later.

What tricks are you using to wear your mask comfortably? Please tell me you are wearing a mask when you're out in public.