Aunties Sewing Squad
How I Came to Sew 2,000 Masks for Vulnerable Communities
Essay by Ellen Gavin From The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice
“Hey, next pandemic, I’ll binge-watch Netflix and bake sourdough bread, while the rest of you sew masks!” Kristina Wong’s semi-abusive post at the outset of the pandemic propelled me to go to Amazon and buy an inexpensive Singer in honor of my loving grandmother Blanche, whose push-pedal Singer rat-a-tatted through my childhood. I hadn’t sewed since the seventh grade, but Kristina had performed in a voting PSA I produced (she rescued a line about a dildo--by making it sing), so she had major cred with me.
Before my grandmother married into an Irish community in Lawrence Massachusetts, she was Branislava Indyke from Galicia, a land that flipped between Poland and Austria for centuries. My babcia Sophiav (her mother) had eight kids and ran boarding house despite not being able to read or write. She pulled Blanche out of the sixth grade to sew for 60 hours in the textile mills for three bucks a week. It must have been spirit-crushing for a twelve-year old, but Blanche made good of it by swapping her paycheck envelope for a smaller one to buy stockings or snacks. Most children of Lawrence lived in extreme poverty, riddled with rickets and TB. But when fifty thousand workers went on strike in 1912 for a 54-hour work week and an end to child labor, they were met with international solidarity. Their slogan was "Yes we fight for bread, but we fight for roses too!" and the strike won all of its demands.
Living in crowded, expensive and unsafe conditions, migrant farmworker families today are in dire peril in the time of COVID-19. So I sewed for those who can’t afford a mask, for those in fields and nursing homes, in prisons and shelters, on Native reservations. Looking down at my 60+ hands, I see my grandmother’s hands. I sew when I really don’t feel up to it, inspired by her. I select, buy and wash the fabric, Auntie Preeti Sharma cuts nearly every piece, close to 12k precuts of fabric. I steam and sew three pairs of twofers together, insert a wire cut by Uncle Randy Bermudez, package and mail them, noting whose hands touched each mask.
I sewed my masks in Blanche’s honor. I thought the Bread and Roses Strike ended child labor in the US, until I realized children put food on our tables today the way kids put clothes on backs a century ago.
In her 80’s, my grandmother might be found repairing her roof or tending her beautiful roses. At her funeral, each of her eight grandchildren received a stamped bank book with $1800 in $5 increments, a fortune for us. The true value wasn’t the money, it was the time, the mindfulness. Blanche’s journey to the bank, eight bank books in hand for decades, was made with love and intention for each of her grandchildren’s health and happiness.
Aunties Sewing Squad reminded me of this truth—that each mask is a simple pure act of love and solidarity. Our government has failed us, but we haven’t failed each other.
Blanche graduated upward through factory floors stratified by skin color—Greeks and Syrians handled dirty wool in the basement; Italians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles on the looms; French, Irish, and a girl named Blanche made it to the top as expert spares --fine sewers. Blanch spent 60 years in factories, transitioning to circuit boards for the military at Honeywell.