Laural Rakas inside the Pemberville Library. Rakas has taken the book packing paper and made animals, birds and a tree.
J.D. Pooley | Sentinel-Tribune
PEMBERVILLE — Laural Rakas’ pandemic paper projects are finally open to the public.
Stop by the village library to view her paper magic — animals, birds and trees — all created from brown book packing.
“This was something during COVID that was a lifesaver for me,” said Rakas, who is the coordinator for children’s services for the Pemberville, Luckey and Stony Ridge libraries. She’s been in that role since 1996.
“It was something creative to do to take you out of your worries.”
It all started with a new refrigerator.
“I was so bored at home and unmotivated,” Rakas said about the start of the shutdowns in March 2020.
A new refrigerator had just arrived at the house and the self-proclaimed recycler couldn’t throw away the box, Rakas said. She started thinking about the summer library program, which has the theme Imagine Your Story, and a paper craft she wanted to try.
“I decided to make the tree first,” she said.
That refrigerator box can be seen, as a tree, in the back corner of the Pemberville library. It’s a space for kids to go play in and read in, Rakas said.
It’s been just a month since the door at the tree base was opened for kids, due to the pandemic, and all of the other library toys were put out, she said.
“Since then, we’ve had lots of families and kids come and play in it. It just makes me really happy that kids are here playing again.”
The other paper creatures are around the room, too.
“My idea was taking something mundane like book packing paper — since we’ve got so much of it — and turning it into something else,” Rakas said. “That’s what started it.”
She had no idea, initially, how to start building.
“I had to learn as I went along. I actually failed a couple times, in trying to figure out how to do it. Then I finally came across something online on how to do something like this with paper mache’,” Rakas said.
The process involves glue, masking tape and “smushing” the paper until it looks just right.
When it is just right, the shapes are fantastic: A stoic lion with a scruffy mane, a baby elephant, a swooning eagle, and that 6-foot-tall gnarly tree with baby owls peeking out from the branches (mama is close by).
“I would say it’s pretty close to paper mache, except usually with paper mache, you think of flour and water and all that mess. I just use Elmer’s glue,” she said.
The most challenging part of sculpting the animals is the faces, Rakas said.
“With the elephant and lion, you’d add a little bit and go, no, that’s not right. Then add a little bit more, and know when to stop,” she said.
Once the faces are to her liking, she adds glass eyes for another lifelike touch.
As Rakas really got into making the creatures, the Pemberville library reached out to branches around the state, asking for their brown book paper, which is used to pad boxes of books.
It arrived in droves.
“We always have a ton of it, and we used to throw it away, which really bothered me —I’m a recycling kind of person,” she said. “At one time, my storytime room was almost half full of bags of paper from other libraries. They sent us so much.”
With the pandemic ending, and programming ramping up, Rakas has less time to work on her paper art. She plans to jump into it again soon, making creatures for this summer’s reading program, which has an ocean theme.
Rakas said she thinks she could teach others to do her paper art, but mostly likely older teens.
“And it would be a multi-week program,” she added. “And maybe something that isn’t quite as big like the lion or the elephant.”
Her work was recently featured in a “you will never see me waste” section of the April issue of Real Simple magazine.
Rakas, who lives in Bowling Green, has worked for the libraries since 1996.
“I’m lucky to work in a job where I can do something like this,” she said.
