A Sturgeon County family has sewn 1,000 masks to help keep St. Albert students safe during the pandemic.
Thousands of students headed back to class this week for the first time since the province closed all K-12 schools in March due to COVID-19.
While each received two reusable masks from the province on arrival, Sir Alexander Mackenzie School students also got some extra-colourful hand-sewn ones that had been donated to the school by Patricia Cheung-Liu and her family.
An accountant who lives in Sturgeon County, Cheung-Liu said she got the idea for this donation while talking with a St. Albert teacher about student safety and the pandemic.
“I think there’s not enough support out there for the children,” she said, noting many parents might be struggling to pay basic school fees, let alone the cost of masks.
Cheung-Liu said she first started sewing reusable masks back in February for her family and her relatives in Hong Kong, and donated 100 masks to the Michael Garron Hospital in Ontario in March. She decided to sew masks for SAM School around mid-August, as her now-adult children James and Eden are alumni of the school.
“Our first goal was to make 500,” Cheung-Liu said, but they decided to double that in case there were a lot of students without masks.
Cheung-Liu said she bought about $1,000 worth of fabric from Fabricland and had herself, her two kids and husband Raymond set up shop in a small corner room to sew, trim, wash, iron and Ziploc-bag 1,000 masks in just under two weeks.
“They literally understand now what a ‘sweatshop’ is,” Cheung-Liu joked, as it got quite warm in the room due to all the ironing.
Cheung-Liu said she and Raymond sewed masks when they got back from their day-jobs, while James and Eden kept at it every day, sometimes for up to nine hours at a time.
“It seemed like a good cause, and it was something to do with all the free time we had now,” James said.
James said they took scheduled breaks, watched TV and switched tasks to keep from getting bored. The most laborious part of the job was trimming the loose threads off the masks – they ended up with several wastepaper-bins full. Eden ended up with enough threads to craft a grapefruit-sized thread-blob she dubbed “Alex Ballwin.”
School grateful
The family worked with St. Albert Public School officials to drop off the masks at SAM on Aug. 28 and Aug. 31.
Principal Cam Makovichuk said he was delighted to hear of the donation.
“The masks are beautiful,” he said, and should be well appreciated by many parents.
Makovichuk said masks could get damp and dirty when worn all day, so it is a good idea for students to have a spare so they can swap them out. This donation would provide each SAM student with two additional reusable masks.
St. Albert Public superintendent Krimsen Sumners said this was the first time she had heard of a resident donating reusable masks to a St. Albert school, and that this was a great gift to the district.
“It’s overwhelming to think that a family could get together and produce something like that,” she said.
Cheung-Liu said the family hopes to sew another 1,000 masks in the months ahead. She encourages everyone with the time, skills, and materials to sew masks to do so and donate them to their local school.
“Every person who makes a mask makes a huge difference,” she said.
Sumners asked anyone who plans to donate masks to a school to first call the school’s principal to see if they need them.
