Nurse helps in a different way: masks for kids
Retired nurse April Knigge shows off some of the fabric she is using to make 300 masks for needy kids at Knolls Vista and Midway elementary schools.
Charles H. Featherstone
MOSES LAKE — April Knigge isn’t able to do a lot of nursing right now.
But the retired intensive care nurse wants to help. And she can sew.
“There’s a little something special about seamstresses,” she said. “We want to do what we can to help.”
So Knigge, 58, is making masks for kids. Little kids. Big kids. High school kids. She has gathered enough material and scattered it across the house she shares with her husband, Doug, three dogs and a cat, to make 300 masks.
She intends to complete the masks for needy kids at Midway and Knolls Vista elementary schools before classes start on Sept. 9.
When the coronavirus pandemic first hit, Knigge said, she made 276 masks, which she gave to the homeless in the area and to Moses Lake Food Bank. And she has been working since Thursday, a one-woman assembly line, sewing a little bit on each mask at a time. She said Monday she had 90 done so far.
She said she’s even got some “cool” fabric — sugar skulls, “Game of Thrones” prints, fire and camouflage — because lots of kids won’t wear a mask that isn’t “cool.”
“It’s so important,” she said. “Kids need to feel pretty special.”
Knigge said she started sewing when she was 10 after an uncle gave her a sewing machine as a gift, a way to distract herself after her brother died. The desire to help is what propelled her to become a nurse, and she said she has truly appreciated the way nursing has allowed her to care for people, both patients and their families.
“Holding somebody’s hand when they are dying is the most amazing thing you can do ever,” she said. “I’m really grateful to have been part of that.”
She sees the ability to take a blank piece of fabric and transform it into something beautiful as a gift as well.
“It does good, and I make a lot of my own clothes. It’s fun,” Knigge said.
It’s all part of how she cares for people, whether they are friends, patients or strangers she has never met.
“I want to pass on that joy,” she said.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].