Seamstress For Cardinals Cheer Switches From Outfits To Masks

Big Red

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Mar 16, 2019
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Joyce Treat has been a seamstress for nearly three decades and has settled into a nice routine in recent years.


She sews uniforms for a variety of dance teams, which has included outfitting the Cardinals cheerleaders since 2017.


This is usually the month the Cardinals unveil their squad, but COVID-19 delayed tryouts, which kept Treat from creating – and getting paid for -- the custom looks. Additionally, with dance studios across the country shut down, her other work came to a grinding halt.


Treat felt a sense of foreboding in early March when she realized her customer base was quickly dwindling to zero. The 61-year-old mother of two and grandmother of three thought she'd have to go on unemployment.


"I was panicking," said Treat, who works from Pie Town, New Mexico, which is about 75 miles east of the Arizona border. "My husband's retired and he's just on social security, so now I'm the main breadwinner, and it's never been that way in the 42 years we've been married."


In the early days of the pandemic, Treat scratched together income by sewing masks for a California company that one of her dance clients worked for, and it gave her another idea.


"Sitting there, I have a lot of time to think as I'm sewing repetitiously," Treat said. "So I was looking through my fabric and I thought, 'I've got a roll of Cardinals fabric that I used to make the cheerleading outfits with.' I had a big ball of that to make their stuff out of, and I still had stuff left over. I looked at that and I went, 'Angie, what do you think about making masks?'"

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