A big thank you to two Year 7 Debney House friends Anabel and Vy who have teamed up over the last few weeks to sew face masks and supply them to people in the community who require one, in return for a donation to our School Fund. So far, they have raised £80, with another order in the pipeline.

Asked about their project Anabel and Vy told me.....

" We decided that we wanted to start the masks project to benefit our communities and give us a challenge to do during lockdown! We chose the school fund because we originally either wanted to give it to the NHS charity or the school. Also many of the people we gave masks to were happy to donate to the school, and a few are planning on joining TGS! We wanted to donate the money to the school, so the benefits of the project are not just the people who got the masks, but also the students!

We have learnt a lot about making masks, sewing and problem solving. The skills will come in very handy in the future! Although we have not received any new 'orders' , apart from one follow up order, we are hoping to get a few more as it is now mandatory to have face masks in shops, and public transport, as not all masks are reusable!

When we started off making the face masks we looked through a few videos to see what would work best for us before deciding our ‘method’. We altered the size of the material to fit different aged people as we realised that there weren’t many masks readily available for younger children. We generally use two pieces of material so that the front is different coloured to the back and has enough layers to filter out any germs! Vaidehi uses a sewing machine (which means she can make them a lot quicker than me as I hand sew!)

So far for marketing our face masks we have only branched out to the people we know/neighbours by asking them over messages. We didn’t put any prices up as we just wanted to help the community and try something new but we ended up with a lot of generous donations!