Dover-Foxcroft seamstress deep into battle against coronavirus

Lillian Mayo might be content simply wearing a face mask in public and otherwise practicing social distancing while waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic quietly from her home at the Thayer Parkway senior housing complex in Dover-Foxcroft.

“I’m feeling OK. I’m staying inside,” she said. “I have one person who gets my groceries and runs errands for me, and I keep myself very aware of what’s around me and who is around me.”

So while the 75-year-old Mayo practices all of that to protect herself, she’s also helping others wage a similar battle against the coronavirus by spending much of her free time at her sewing machine creating protective face coverings.

Bangor Daily News photo/Ernie Clark
MASK MAKING — Lillian Mayo works to make a face mask at her Dover-Foxcroft home.

“This is my contribution to the battle against the virus,” the seamstress said. “I’ve always had a very strong feeling about helping people. I can’t give blood, but this is something I can do.”

Mayo has crafted more than 140 cloth face masks for use against the spread of the coronavirus since Allison Smith, Piscataquis County coordinator of Sewing Masks for Maine, contacted her about volunteering for the cause.

Sewing Masks for Maine is a statewide network of volunteers who have been making and donating cloth masks to Maine’s health care organizations since the pandemic spread to the Pine Tree State.

“Lillian is just amazing,” Smith said. “The quality of her work has been fantastic and she’s quick, too. She’s a real pro, and I could tell when I met her in her doorway with my mask on that she really, really knows what she’s doing and has a great deal of confidence and competence as well.”

Mayo’s willingness to assist the cause should come as no surprise because she has worked as one with her sewing machine for more than five decades.

“I have quite a client base,” said the East Dover native, who has three daughters, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. “I don’t charge all that much, but here again it goes to just helping people.

“You kind of sense when someone needs that zipper on their jacket fixed, and I know their circumstances and they really can’t afford to pay a lot so I do a lot of helping folks out.”

Mayo didn’t need much convincing to join the battle against COVID-19.

“I was approached and asked if I’d be willing to volunteer and make masks and I said, ‘Certainly, that’s a good idea and there is a need for it’,” she said.

Mayo makes several different sizes of face masks, and estimates that each one takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete.

When selecting fabric she said she considers the person who might be wearing the particular mask.

“I start with a pattern and cut it out, and I coordinate fabric and colors because I think of what color would a man want to wear and what color would a woman want to wear?” she said. “I’ve even got children’s masks I make, too, so I have to think of what little girls and little boys would want, what colors they’d go for.

“I’ve got some fabric that’s yellow and got bumblebees on it. The kids would love it.”

Mayo has maintained a steady supply of cloth, but having enough elastic on hand has been more challenging.

“I’ve had a lot of fabric donated to me and I have a lot of my own fabric I’ve been using up,” she said. “The elastic has become very hard to find because all of a sudden everyone is making masks, so the supply chain is pretty bad. Sometimes it takes two weeks to get the elastic here.”

While the Sewing Masks for Maine effort is set to end in mid-May after delivering more than 15,000 masks to health care providers around the state, according to the organization’s website, Mayo has no plans to stop churning out the cloth coverings.

Many of her recent creations have gone to local residents free of charge, and her kitchen counter on this day had a healthy supply ready for other people who might need them.

“I put it on Facebook because people will write in asking where they can get face masks and I just answer back and tell them I’ve got some here,” she said. “Other people come in and say, ‘The word on the street is you’re making masks,’ and I say ‘yes’.”

Gov. Janet Mills in a directive last week specified that Mainers should wear cloth face coverings  in public settings where other physical distancing measures are difficult to maintain — an additional indication that Mayo’s work is not done.

“Because everyone now has got to wear them, there’s going to be a bigger demand,” she said. “My only question is why are we doing this in May? Why weren’t we doing this in March and April?

“I think a lot of people were lulled into a false sense of security, like ‘it’s not going to get me, I’m not going to be where it is.’ I think we better do this for a while,” she said.