On a mission to sew masks for her senior home neighbors

Lois Korinek is on a mission to help keep people safe from the coronavirus.

The 94-year-old resident of Village Pointe Commons in Grafton has been busy crafting more than 300 fabric masks for residents of her senior living facility and others operated by Capri Senior Communities, including Harbor Campus in Port Washington.

“I can almost do them without looking now,” Korinek said.

Korinek is an inspiration, said Kathy Rassel, community relations manager at Village Poine Commons.

“She is so full of life,” Rassel said. “So many people are frustrated because they don’t know what they can do. She’s determined to help. She’s a crazy sewer. It’s her way of helping.

“She said to me, ‘I’m having the time of my life.’”

Korinek, who grew up in Milwaukee and met her husband Donald while working as a soda jerk in a drugstore there, said she’s been sewing since she was 16 and took home economics class.

From the start, she said, she loved to sew.

“I sew everything,” Korinek said.

“Even after I was married, I went to a night-time class in Port Washington.”

Sewing came in handy when she was raising the couple’s eight children, she said, noting the family lived in Milwaukee and Brookfield before moving to Grafton in 1965.

After her husband retired, the couple moved up north, where they lived in their summer cottage for 25 years.

“We had a wonderful 25 years of retirement,” she said.

But Mr. Korinek died eight years ago, and now his wife lives at Village Pointe Commons, where the county’s first outbreak of the coronavirus occurred. It has since been cleared.

Korinek said that the senior living facility “is the greatest place to live,” with a staff that cares and residents who become friends.

She has a dedicated sewing room with three sewing machines — two that she uses regularly and one in case one of the others needs to be fixed — in a sunny area.

 She’s still an avid seamstress, so when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, her daughter Mary asked her why she wasn’t making masks.

“I said nobody wants those,” Korinek said. But the next day Rassel asked about masks.

“I kept thinking, how would I make that,” Korinek said. “I drew myself a pattern and I made one.”

She’s still using that pattern, creating the masks out of scrap material.

“It’s very easy,” Korinek said. Not including the time it takes to lay out the pattern and cut out the pieces, she said, “I can put one together in four or five minutes.”

Her favorite ones, she said, are made from old jeans. She lines the denim with other material so they aren’t stiff.

Konicek said she’s happy to make the masks, but she is having trouble obtaining the elastic she uses to hold them in place. She’s looking for elastic that is between one-quarter inch and an inch wide.

Konicek has made enough masks for all the residents in the independent living section of Village Pointe Commons, as well as Harbor Campus in Port Washington and other Capri Community homes.

But, she lamented, “I never see them on people” since residents are confined to their rooms right now.

Some of her masks have even gone international. Korinek said she made about 20 for her daughter Janice’s best friend, who works in environmental services and sent them to locations elsewhere — and she’s heard a few ended up in such places as Kenya and Iceland.

“I’m happy to do this,” Korinek said. “My first love is sewing. I’m a go-getter. I have to move. I have to be doing things.”