Button Up and Save Your Ears

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Monday, 13 April 2020 11:45

The Button Up and Save Your Ears team have now made over 3,000 headbands for front line workers and looking for donations of buttons.

UPDATE - The Button Up and Save Your Ears team have now made over 3,000 headbands for front line workers.

These headbands are designed to be multi fit for health care workers and they have been approved for hospitals and nursing homes.

A company in Montreal has donated 450 metres of stretch fabric so they can continue to make these headbands. They are still in need of donations for buttons. They need thousands of buttons to keep up with the demand. If you are able to donate, you can drop off buttons to Sue's front porch at 38 Finch Avenue in Woodstock or you can reach out to them on their Facebook Page.

WOODSTOCK - A Woodstock woman has created a Facebook group to make headbands with buttons on them for nurses.

Sue Bottrill owned a dance studio in Cambridge for 30 years, and along with teaching dance, she also made a lot of the costumes and has a background in sewing. Bottrill decided she couldn't sit on the sidelines during the pandemic and created the Button Up and Save Your Ears Facebook Page. The goal was to make headbands with buttons on them to save the ears of our frontline workers. Healthcare professionals are currently required to wear masks for their entire shift and it is really hard on the ears. Bottrill says they started out by making a few headbands for friends and then the group kind of took off from there.

"I had a lot of former students working as health professionals and my daughter has a lot of friends in the health care workforce and she put it out to a group of her friends and it just snowballed from there. We had a lot of volunteers offer to help so I created a group and it just went crazy. So now we have sent 1,500 headbands with buttons on them and we are making 200 a day. We have 20-30 volunteers helping out from all over, they are from Woodstock, Ingersoll, Ayr, Kitchener, Cambridge, all over with different groups of people sewing the buttons on."

The elastic on the masks that the nurses have to wear all day can be really hard on the ears and very painful. The buttons and headbands are designed to save their ears. Button Up to Save Your Ears currently has 165 members and they have made over 1,500 headbands. Bottrill says they are sending the headbands all over the Province.

"We actually have a box going to Ottawa today, we have sent them to the Woodstock Hospital, Woodingford Lodge St. Marys in Kitchener, Alexandra in Ingersoll, Joseph Brant in Burlington, Joseph in Guelph, Caressant Care, the four hospitals in London, they have the COVID assessment clinic down there, so sent a 100."

Bottrill did say they are in need of donations for buttons and stretch fabric. You can drop off donations on her porch at 38 Finch Avenue in Woodstock.

You can listen to the full interview with Botrill below.

The nurses are very grateful as you can tell from some of their messages of thanks.