Monstrously fun knit masks encourage social distancing

Face mask style is a thing, and one Reykjavík designer has seriously upped the ante.

The artist Ýrúrarí is a textile designer who works mostly with knitting. She says that "adding knitted 3D elements to second hand sweaters has been the theme of my work for the past years." She makes sweaters covered with knit lips, tongues, teeth, and other fantastical, enchantingly grotesque three dimensional features.

But Ýrúrarí has been working above the neck recently. She has been turning many of the 3D elements from her sweaters into face masks.

"Now face masks are becoming such a necessity and part of our life I thought it could be interesting to translate my ideas into that form, inspired by current events," Ýrúrarí told Mashable in an email. "I was not expecting to connect well with the form of the face mask, but it makes sense, I do use forms of the face and expressions a lot in my usual work. So before really noticing it I had already made a small line of knitted face-mask[s]."

The result is masks featuring long three dimensional tongues, enormous lips, braces, fangs, and more.

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Ýrúrarí did not design the masks to sell or be functional, really. However, she is offering a DIY knitting pattern of a tongue for sale so people can make some of the masks themselves, and suggests wearing a knit mask over a "real deal" face mask (since the knitted ones have holes and the whole point of a cloth mask is to protect others).

"People with basic knitting knowledge can easily transform that pattern to something similar to my masks," Ýrúrarí said. "And is there anything better to do than maybe calm down and knit right now?"

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Ýrúrarí also notes an upside of the masks: Their freaky appearance might help with your social distancing efforts.

"I didn't really make the masks to wear, in my mind they are more like wearable sculptures, not made for safety more as a fun approach to the rule of keeping distance, if you look scary enough people will stay away!"

Whatever works, we guess!

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