The Bold Italic’s 2020 Awards

Meet the Bay Area’s Best Mask Maker, Who Does Business via Instagram

MasksByMisty offers a huge selection of masks from a variety of prints

Sophia Smith
5 min readDec 17, 2020

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A person wearing a face mask made of cloth with a waterfowl motif.
Photo courtesy of MasksByMisty

This article is part of The Bold Italic’s 2020 Awards, which celebrate the Bay Area’s small businesses and local residents who have hustled and shown creativity throughout 2020. See all of the award winners here.

Back in the spring, huge fashion brands weren’t the only ones pivoting to mask production. Many local Bay Areans also got in the game. We at the Bold Italic even launched the series Mask Envy to highlight all the creative masks we’ve seen made locally.

As for our 2020 awards, the winner of the Best Local Mask Maker is Misty Newland of MasksByMisty. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she’s found herself operating a one-woman fundraising and mask-making operation mainly through Instagram DMs.

Her tri-panel masks feature cute prints with a fun, stickered scrapbook vibe, and she’s expanded her offerings to include baby bibs and dog collar accessories to ensure that no fabric scrap goes to waste.

Perhaps best of all, MasksByMisty donates half of its total sales. Recent donations have gone to Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and…

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Sophia Smith

writer and editor // Ⓥ // Heavy weights, heavy music, words of all size