By the end of this week, hundreds of health care workers in the Quad Cities will have masks to protect them from the coronavirus. An online quilt store, based in Rock Island, is donating the fabric, and has rounded up some volunteers to do the sewing.
The owner of Quilt Addicts Anonymous, Stephanie Soebbing, says they've put together a sort of no contact assembly line.
"All the tubs and pieces get dropped off at one person's house and then those people serge the edges so you don't have to fold over and finish and do fancy finishes. And then it gets dropped for the next person who does some sewing and so on, until have have a finished mask ready to be donated."
Their goal is 4,000 masks for employees of Unity Point Health Trinity, so each person has at least one to wear and one to wash.
"There was a study done that showed that quilting cotton is one of the best materials - it blocks 70 to 79 per cent of particles because the thread count is woven very densely."
Because elastic for these masks is so hard to come by these days, Soebbing put together a video on how to substitute ties for elastic - so far on You Tube it's been viewed 1.3 million times.
