If you are trying to conserve face fabric (you know, the fancy stuff you put on the outside) and/or trying to get as many masks out of a piece of fabric as you can, you may be interested in how I modify the Owl Be Sewing pattern I talk about in my pervious post about face coverings into an Olsen-style mask.
Also included below is a tip on how I add the nose wire channel to the masks.
Modify the pattern
First step is to print out the Owl Be Sewing patterns (see previous post), and to look over the sewing instructions to the Olsen pattern. You may not even need my tutorial here to figure it out! Confirm that the box with an X in it is indeed a once inch square for proper scale.
At the dotted lines for pieces A and B add a 1/4 inch seam allowance as shown. You now have new Olsen-Style pattern pieces! label them as such.
Now we go to construction!
- Cut two of piece A out of face or fashion fabric. This is what the world will see.
- Cut two of piece B out of a lining or other coordinating fabric (I like to do B in a color that is different than piece C.)
- Place pieces A and B right sides together and sew a 1/4 inch seam along the edgers where you added the seam allowance. Clip your corners.
- From here you proceed as you would with the regular Owl Be Sewing pattern instructions!
Add a channel for a nose wire
If you add these two steps to your construction you can easily add a channel for a nose wire to the mask:
- Before you sew the face fabric to the lining, make a notch about 1/2 an inch down from the top of the nose pieces so that the nose wire can pass more easily past the selvage.
- Once I’ve completed the mask, I sew a channel 1/2 an inch from edge to edge just to the inside of the flaps (piece B) so I can tuck the wire ends behind the flaps.
And that’s it! Let me know what you think! And check put my Mask Making post here!