Collective in South East London making fabulous funky free washable face masks for key workers whose jobs have become extraordinarily challenging.

People with what were considered until very recently as normal under-valued jobs have found themselves to be key workers facing extraordinary challenges, that they never signed up or were trained for.

Corinne McManus has been running her textile design company, Atom Designs, for over 30 years providing prints to fashion and sports brands around the world. Even before the lockdown occurred, her company, reliant on international travel, was one of the first to feel clients closing their doors to all visitors. But instead of hanging her head she got busy, taking the 100s of spare unique fabric samples that they had and started transforming them into free colourful patterned face masks for key workers or whatever you want to call them.

In a just over a week we've delivered over 500 masks, with 320 so far going to bus drivers in New Cross and Greenwich bus garages, and have over a thousand masks being made by an amazing collective of 50+ sewers and plenty of others volunteering to keep it going.

We've cut up all the fabric we can afford to cut and bought some fabulous African fabrics for the next batch ourselves. We've received and are receiving amazing fabric donations but to make more masks, which we're all going to need, we'll need some financial resources too, please. Every little bit helps as every mask helps. If, when this is over, we have money left over it will be donated to local charities. Thank you for helping.