Fab Lab, local mom making protective equipment

DEER ISLE—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.