Photo by Deb Gau Sheila Tabaka and LeAnne Syring worked Monday to sew together cloth face masks for this fall’s incoming students at SMSU. A group of faculty have been working on the masks, with the goal of making around 400 of them.

MARSHALL — The COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing mean class at Minnesota colleges and universities will likely look different this fall. But even in the middle of that change, a group of Southwest Minnesota State University faculty are working to welcome new students as safely as possible.

“I think it’s because we all like to sew, too,” said LeAnne Syring. Syring, an associate professor of special education at SMSU, was one of the people gathered on campus Monday to sew cloth face masks for incoming students at the university. Around eight people have been working to make special masks with the SMSU Mustang logo. The goal is to have a total of around 400 masks — enough to give one to each new student at orientation in August, they said.

Last week, the mask project was even featured on a news segment on WCCO.

With everything going on in the world, “It’s great to be part of something positive,” said Mark Fokken, associate professor of communication studies at SMSU.

On Monday afternoon, the SMSU theater costume shop was set up like an assembly line. Fokken and Jon Nelson were each cutting out dozens of cloth panels for the masks, while other group members sewed them together, ironed them, and measured lengths of elastic for ear loops.

The mask project “hatched” out of an all-university Zoom meeting back in April, Fokken said. As SMSU President Kumara Jayasuriya was discussing the possibility of students returning to campus, people brought forward the idea sewing masks for the students, Fokken said.

“It just took off from there,” he said. “I knew we had a lot of sewers on campus.”

Several people in the group even had lots of experience making face masks.

“I think we’ve all been sewing masks for other people,” Syring said.

Different group members had sewn masks for everyone from family to nursing students, area medical workers and firefighters. Linda Nelson said she started sewing masks for family members back in March.

“I’m a quilter, so I had fabric already,” she said. Now, she and her husband Jon have been working as a team to cut out and sew masks.

The group of mask makers is working with fabric that was custom-printed for the project. The fabric pattern includes the SMSU name and mustang logo, but the images are angled in such a way that they can be read no matter how the fabric is cut and sewn. It helps make the finished masks look better, group members said.

“We had been doing most of this on our own,” theater professor Sheila Tabaka said of cutting and sewing the mask pieces. But after last week, the group started gathering on campus to work on the masks in the costume shop and black box theater areas. “It’s a great space to do it,” Tabaka said.