With their business shuttered amid the state’s “Stay At Home” order, Erickson Embroidery’s staff have been volunteering to make face masks. They’ve already made and donated about 150 masks for people at the Villa St. Vincent/The SUMMIT, RiverView Health, and other organizations that need them.
Owner Steve Erickson said that Dawn Edlund had the idea last week and should be able to make about 800 more when a shipment of elastic arrives later this week. “Dawn said we have all this material, we should make masks. So I said if you want to, go ahead,” said Erickson. “We started producing them, and we’ve made a bunch already. We’ve made about 150 already. The Summit has a bunch, and the Villa has some. We’re working on a fairly large order of 200 for RiverView right now. We’re plugging away at it as fast as we can get them out. We’re kind of short on elastic, but we’ve got some coming toward the end of the week. We have enough elastic for 800 (masks) coming. It’s tough to find that stuff, but we did find it a place to get it.”
Erickson said he believes the masks are being used as secondary masks in health care and that they’ll make masks for individuals once they have enough for the health care facilities. “I believe most are using them as a secondary mask over their regular masks,” said Erickson. “These are for people going out to the grocery store, who want to feel they have a little extra protection, type of thing. We’re donating them to everybody. We’ve gotten a lot of phone calls, and I’m not doing any of the single (orders) until we’ve taken care of the big nursing homes and Riverview. Then, if you want some, we’ll give you a place to pick them up. We don’t want a bunch of people coming in and out of here either. We’ll find a place to get rid of them, and if you want one, you can go get them, and we’ll go from there.”
Word is already getting out about the excellent service Erickson’s Embroidery is doing for the community. A nursing home in Morris, Minnesota, called to inquire about getting some masks because they haven’t been able to find any locally and Erickson said he’ll ship some out to them as well. “There was a nursing home that called us yesterday from Morris, MN,” said Erickson. “A person who graduated from Crookston called, she said they couldn’t find masks anywhere. They’ll take 20 of them right now, so we’re going to ship a couple of them up there and, hopefully, help them out too.”
