Living

Tucson Mask Makers

July 12, 2020 |
Camouflage mask by NAK

Mask up and shop local! Tucson mask makers and shops are helping to keep our community safe by offering face coverings in a range of designs and styles. Here are a few makers and places that caught our eyes.

ADIA JAMILLE

Adia Jamille is a textile artist who explores heritage and self through embroidery and quilting. In addition to home textiles and hand printed items such as baby blankets and hand dyed silk scarves, her triple layered face masks come in a range of modern prints. Her masks are 100% cotton and washable and they feature a pocket for a filter and a wire in the nose for a tighter fit. There is an option to purchase a mask and hand sanitizer duo (the hand sanitizer is made by Latina owned, Medicine Nuestra). 

Cost: Child $8, Adult / Large $10. Shipping is available. 
IG: @JamilleTextiles
FB: Jamille Textiles
www.AdiaJamille.com/face-masks  

Mask by Adia Jamille

DESIGNS BY MW

One night in between studying for finals, Michelle Willis stayed up and taught herself how to sew masks using her mom’s sewing machine. Inspired to give back to her community, she donated over 700 masks in Sahuarita and Tucson while balancing nursing school and parenting. Now her masks are available to purchase through her Facebook page and on Etsy.  

Cost: $10 for adults and children. Custom orders available. Local pickup available or $5 flat rate fee. 
FB: Designs by MW
www.Etsy.com/Shop/DesignsMW  

Masks by Michelle Willis

LAURA TANZER ATELIER

Her first series of masks were made from scraps from her own garment production. She uses natural fibers such as cotton and instead of elastic, uses two pairs of ribbon, one you tie behind your head and the other you tie behind your neck.

Laura makes sure small droplets are not coming in from the sides or below the chin or around the nose, so she has engineered her masks to include some insulated copper bell wire across the top of the mask so you can fit to your nose, eliminating the gap that can let in droplets, and also great for glasses wearers. She sews in Filtrete 1900 air filter material, between the interior cotton layer and the exterior cotton layer. The result is not medical grade N95, but it is much better than cotton by itself.

Learn more at https://lauratanzerdesigns.com/we-are-in-this-together/
410 N. Toole Ave
520-981-9891

Laura Tanzer, right, in her shop.

MILDRED AND DILDRED 

This popular toy shop offers stretchy cotton face masks for toddlers and kiddos in a range of kid friendly prints, made by their local seamstress team. 

Cost: $8.50 for all sizes. Offers delivery, curbside or store pickups.
520-615-6266
IG: @MildredandDildred
FB: Mildred & Dildred
www.MildredandDildred.com

Space Dinos mask by Mildred & Dildred

NAK MASKS 

Shauna Smith had recently opened Needles and Knots, a sewing and design school when the shutdown occurred. Soon customers were requesting masks and so within a few weeks she developed a mask with a unique style, the NAK M820 and a lighter weight version, the NAK M1720 “Swoosh”. With a minimalist design and modern prints, her masks are comfortable and use a sliding bead to easily adjust the fit. 

Cost: $15 for adult and kid sizes. Free local pickup is offered as well as priority shipping. 
520-261-9548
NAKMasks@gmail.com
FB: NAK Masks
www.NAKMasks.com

Cactus Stubble mask by Needles & Knots (NAK)

POP-CYCLE

This women owned shop is a beloved favorite for gifts, featuring locally made art and goods, often with recycled or quirky elements. Recently their team has been busy sewing masks with fun and gender neutral patterns available to purchase or donate one to someone in need. Over the last several months they have donated masks to the Navajo and Tohono O’odham Nations. Their masks are made with 100% cotton and elastic straps and available in two styles. One style has 3 layers with a wire sewn over the nose but a string can be added if a tie on mask is preferred. This style is a tad wider and can accommodate a bigger nose or face. The second style has two layers with an opening for a filter. 

Cost: $14 for adult and kid sizes. Shipping is available.
520-622-3297
IG: @PopCycleShop
FB: Pop-Cycle Shop
www.PopCycleShop.com

Pop Cycle Masks

QMULATIVE 

Known for his hand crafted pocket tees, Quinlan Wilhite has turned his Phoenix Fashion Week Designer of the Year sewing skills towards masks. His masks are cotton with a filter pocket, elastic hoops and they are washable. When you purchase a mask, he will donate a mask to an individual in need. 

Cost: $15 for ages 6 and up. Shipping is available.
IG: @Qmulative
FB: Qmulative
www.QmulativeBrand.com

Masks prints by QMULATIVE

SWEET NOLA BOUTIQUE 

What started out as making masks to donate to frontline workers in Tucson evolved into an effort to make over 4,000 masks sent to the VA Hospital, Banner, Emerge Women’s Center and other facilities and community front line workers across the country. Now masks are available to individuals for purchase or by donation to organizations and facilities that need them most. Their masks have 3-layers with 100% cotton face covers and 3 styles are available: pleated, face conforming or rope tie. Custom requests for wording, logos or embroidery are welcome. Random prints are sent for online orders. If a donation is needed please email riapatino09@gmail.com for consideration and pick up arrangements. 

Cost: $7 for adult and children sizes. Shipping and local pick-up is available.  520-260-0271
FB: Sweet Nola Baby Boutique
www.SweetNolaBaby.com 

Sweet Nola Baby Boutique

TINY & TOOTHLESS 

Tiny and Toothless was started in 2015 by Ruth Latona, a high school art teacher and mother. She primarily makes baby bibs and bandanas, but when the pandemic shutdown occurred, she quickly pivoted to where the need was strongest and started sewing masks. Her masks are contoured with three layers of 100% cotton and ties. Custom made for small children up to larger sizes. 

Cost: $10 regardless of the size. Shipping is $2 to anywhere in the U.S.A, no matter what quantity is ordered.
Tiny&Toothless@gmail.com
IG: @TinyandToothless
FB: Tiny and Toothless
www.Etsy.com/Shop/TinyandToothless

Tiny & Toothless cactus mask

WHY I LOVE WHERE I LIVE 

This popular gift shop celebrating our city, offers a range of fun local goods from clothing and jewelry to stickers, books, toys and games. Their face masks are cotton with elastic hoops and a filter pocket, and are created by their in-house seamstress and for every mask sold, they will donate to a local organization in need.  

Cost: $15, for ages 6 and up. Shipping is available.
520-422-5770 
Info@WhyILoveWhereILive.com
IG: @WhyILoveWhereILive
FB: Why I Love Where I Live 
www.WhyILoveWhereILive.com

Tucson Together mask available at Why I Love Where I Live

WORST WESTERN 

Known for handmade lingerie with an artistic flair and ready to wear garments, Diana Williams, designer and seamstress of Worst Western, believes that learning a trade like sewing not only empowers you but allows you to be of service to your community. She began offering free masks to encourage their use to those who may have been resistant to the idea or for those who are not able to afford one. All masks in the shop are hand printed and pieced together at a sewing machine by Diana. Her masks come in a range of materials and feature elastic straps. Strings can be added. 

Cost: $8 to $25, adult and kid sizes available. Free shipping. WorstWestern@gmail.com
IG: @WorstWestern
www.ShopWorstWestern.com

Black & White Dust Mask by Worst Western

Zócalo Magazine – March 2020

March 4, 2020 |

Zócalo Magazine – January 2020

January 3, 2020 |

Zócalo Magazine – December 2019

December 3, 2019 |

Interstate 11: A Road to Nowhere

June 19, 2019 |

Saguaro National Park West, looking into Avra Valley

Saguaro National Park West, looking into Avra Valley

Break out a map of the United States. Start at the Canadian border, at the Michigan town of Port Huron. Trace your finger through Flint and Lansing and down to Indianapolis. Arc southwestward through Paducah, Kentucky, to Memphis, then cross the Big Muddy near Greenville, Mississippi, and barrel down to Texarkana, Houston, and on to the Mexican border at Laredo and Brownsville.

You have just described what has been slugged Interstate 69, the so-called NAFTA Highway. It was approved way back when that trade agreement was first signed, with plans costing upwards of $2.5 billion. So far only segments have been built, since the federal government has been slack on infrastructure since the days of the Great Recession, and the current administration hates the very notion of trade agreements in the first place. About the only place where much activity is taking place is Texas, where, for the past decade, sections of the highway have been laid out and others constructed using funds from tolls, public-private partnerships, and fees imposed on commercial vehicles.

Now focus on Arizona. Draw a line from Nogales to just north of Green Valley. Jog to the west through the Avra Valley behind the Tucson Mountains. Follow a line roughly parallel to the existing Interstate 10 up to Casa Grande, then jog west again through the Maricopa Mountains to Buckeye. Go west more, across the wetlands of the Gila and Hassayampa Rivers, and follow Aguila Road and the Vulture Mine Road up to Wickenburg.

You have just described the southern reach of what has been designated Interstate 11, following US transportation conventions that number north-south highways sequentially from west to east and east-west highways from south to north. Like I–69, its ghostly counterpart, I–11 is meant to hasten the flow of goods from Mexico north to Canada and vice versa, connecting to roads leading to lucrative markets in Salt Lake City, Denver, the Bay Area, Seattle, and so forth.

Like I–69, portions of I–11 already exist in the form of a US 93 that runs north from Wickenburg to Kingman and thence to Las Vegas over the recently built Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge at Boulder Dam. Beyond Las Vegas 93 has been improved only here and there, but planners at the Arizona Department of Transportation are itching to get going, Texas-style, without waiting for the rest of the Mountain West to catch up.

Now, highways are like water: as the old saying goes, water flows uphill toward money, and roads flow either to where money exists or where it can be made—one reason why, when Loop 202 was slated to be extended around the South Mountains of Phoenix, there was a quiet scramble to buy up the land where the road would be built. If you care to go up and have a look at that massive construction project, which is supposed to be finished by the end of this year, you’ll see another fact about highways: Though the roads themselves are comparatively narrow, they require huge tracts of land on either side of them to be bladed, cleared of vegetation, and leveled.

ADOT’s preferred route, across great stretches of undeveloped land, would visit destruction on scores of thousands of acres of prime Sonoran Desert land. Much of the Tucson stretch lies adjacent to Saguaro National Park and Tucson Mountain Parks. Although the plan overlooks the fact, I–11 would also isolate Ironwood Forest National Monument, which at least some members of the Trump Department of Interior have made efforts to decommission, the better to privatize it and make some of that longed-for money.

Says Kevin Dahl of the National Parks Conservation Association and a longtime environmental activist, “Improving I–19 and I–10 through Tucson would be so much more beneficial to our community’s transportation needs than a new freeway in a location and direction that almost no one in Pima County needs to travel. Add the facts that the new freeway has huge impacts and a huge cost, and we really do have to ask why this alternative has not been fully explored and reviewed. We and others who have been involved in scoping and stakeholder process have wondered why the emphasis on developing the problematic Avra Valley route.”

ADOT counters that it is offering alternatives, but it also makes plain that the route I asked you to trace from Nogales to Wickenburg is its preferred one, its first choice, the course it wants Arizonans to embrace, writing the collateral damage off as a cost of the progress that feeds The Machine. Some of its arguments seem to be stretches: for one thing, ADOT says, I–11 will have a “homeland security” dimension in the event that the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station at Wintersburg, which the new road will pass close to, blows a stack, allowing for the rapidly developing West Valley of Phoenix to be evacuated. And “rapidly developing” is no exaggeration: It’s the fastest-growing part of our fast-growing state. Small wonder that Bill Gates, the former Microsoft head who once was reckoned to be the richest man in the world, bought up a 20,000-acre tract of land between the White Tank and Belmont Mountains for a reported $80 million. The location, as it happens, is right in the path of the proposed interstate, assuring the likelihood of a handsome return on the investment.

Why build a new interstate that will destroy prime desert land, disrupt wildlife corridors, churn up public domain holdings, turn national parks and monuments into islands, and effectively bypass existing cities and their infrastructure in favor of seeding new ones in a state already strapped for water in the face of a quickly changing climate? Why, money, of course: Money for agricultural interests, trucking companies, landowners, developers, roadbuilders, all the usual suspects. Money for unseen future interests as well—perhaps for the Spanish conglomerate, for instance, that has turned the Indiana segment of Interstate 80, which American taxpayers paid for years ago, into a private toll road that generates billions of dollars annually. Doubtless such a concern is waiting in the wings, for, as former Bush administration US Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters notes, “While per-gallon fuel taxes served as a proxy for our highway needs in the past, the pending insolvency of the federal Highway Trust Fund proves that model to be unsustainable.” Funding new highways, in other words, will come from other sources—including the possibility of mileage taxes, private ownership, tolls, and the like.

Meanwhile, building I–11 along the route that ADOT’s planners hope for will cost untold billions of dollars—and at least $3.4 billion over improving existing highways in Tucson alone. Tucson civic leaders have voiced opposition to the new road precisely for the reason that the money would be better spent locally rather than bypass the city altogether. It would certainly be possible to use existing roads, though it would be messy: Just look at I–10 around Houston, parts of which in west of downtown run eleven lanes wide, and anyone who has to travel the interstate in town or between Tucson and Phoenix will probably not be enthusiastic at the prospect of yet more traffic filling an ocean of asphalt. Almost as if a threat as much as a scenario, some ADOT planners have even advanced the notion of a stacked I–10 through Tucson, the upper deck headed north and the lower deck headed south, which seems to offer a little slice of hell for future motorists.

That future is very much of concern, for unless vast pots of money magically appear, it may take ten or twenty years for a 268-mile-long new highway to be completed. A lot can happen in that time, including the possibility of driverless vehicles that can efficiently use existing roads—or the development of newer and better forms of transportation, such as high-speed trains, that can deliver goods transcontinentally in far less time than any semi could. The age of the highway and of the automobile may well be drawing to an end, should be drawing to an end, though there are powerful forces at work seeking to extract every last cent possible from a fossil-fuel-based economy and opposed to anything that looks progressive, renewable, or “soft.” One of the last big highway bills was passed under the Obama administration, and even there the president slated $8 billion for the development of high-speed intercity freight and passenger railroads. Retrograde in every respect, the Obama administration’s successors have been busy undoing that, of course.

How do you and I benefit from a road that will speed up the transport of winter vegetables from Mexico to Canada? How does Arizona benefit from a diminished, fragmented desert ecosystem? It doesn’t, and unless you’re a mogul in the making, you and I don’t. But those powerful interests are at work, and landowners and developers, especially in the Phoenix area, are already counting their money as the Valley continues its inexorable sprawl, now to the west.

This is a road to nowhere, and it should be opposed. The Arizona Department of Transportation is accepting comments from the public until July 8, and we urge all those who care about the health of the Sonoran Desert to urge ADOT to find other alternatives—whether following existing roads or scrapping the project altogether. Comments—a simple “no” will do—can be sent online at www.i11study.com/Arizona, delivered by voice at (844) 544–8049, or sent by mail to I–11 Tier 1 EIS Study Team, c/o ADOT Communications, 1655 W. Jackson Street Mail Drop 126F, Phoenix, AZ 85007.

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