Haystack Fab Lab Coordinator, James Rutter, started fabricating the face shields in March when a Brooksville writer named Jill Day decided to make them at home. She turned to Haystack for help cutting the plastic, thus jumpstarting what Haystack now calls the COVID-19 PPE Project.

Rutter thought he’d be making face shields through the summer, but now it looks as if the project will go on indefinitely, he said. It has had financial help from the Maine Community Foundation and various local donors. Someone who orders five face shields might give them $20, Rutter said. Haystack employs the students.

From face shields the project expanded to ear savers, adjustable hooks used behind the head to hold the elastic straps on face masks that otherwise cause discomfort. Rutter is also looking into making child-sized face shields and possibly desk shields for classrooms.

A peninsula woman and Haystack’s Fab Lab director are taking orders for personal protective equipment (PPE) from hospitals, ambulance corps and congregate care facilities coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.

It started in late March as an impromptu effort to make face shields for Blue Hill’s hospital. Brooksville writer Jill Day and the Fab Lab’s James Rutter—two people who never met—started working together, but separately, on that project.

Day cut the elastic for the first 500 face shields by hand.

“I’m still swollen on the hand that scissor-cut over 500 strips of elastic,” she wrote in an email. But she did borrow a paper cutter from the Bay School to cut the foam part.

Meanwhile Rutter cut plastic with the Fab Lab’s laser cutter.

By Monday, April 21, they’d made and delivered 400 face shields, with another 100 ready to go.

The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts announced Tuesday that it cancelled its 2020 program because of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. The decision will prevent the annual influx of about 1,200 people from all over the world who ordinarily live and work together on Haystack’s remote 35-building campus.

Haystack made the announcement public Tuesday afternoon, March 31, just hours before Maine Gov. Janet Mills ordered all Maine people to stay at home.

“It was a devastating decision to make,” Paul Sacaridiz, Haystack’s executive director, said in a phone interview. But, he said, they decided to suspend the program to keep people safe. “And I’m incredibly proud of that,” he said.

The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts held the first-ever Public Access Fab Lab winter workshop on February 15, teaching local people how to use a laser cutter.

The Fab Lab, a digital fabrication studio, has small-scale, high-tech production equipment that artisans can use to make things from delicate wood inlay to 4’ by 8’ furniture.

During its nine-year existence, the [Haystack] Fab Lab has reached out to the Union 76 schools, as well as Haystack’s summer residents. Now the winter workshops, part of a series, represent Haystack’s efforts to further expand its Fab Lab resources to the larger community.