It’s certainly beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the Sapulpa Public Library—particularly in one of their display cabinets, where you’ll find a small Christmas village made up of a dozen or so buildings, created by nothing more than paper and glue.
The project is the latest showcasing the possibilities of the Library’s new Dewey STEM Studio, a recent addition to the library available for free to the general public. Rhonda Huffman, the Genealogy Librarian, is the one who created most of the houses in the village, and says the project was create to entice the community to come create their own.
“It’s really easy,” she said. “The biggest house took me about a week. I was really ambitious,” she said, laughing.
The other houses might be smaller, but they’re nothing to scoff at; the amazing detail and color would make anyone doubt that they’re made with simple card-stock paper that can be purchased at Walmart, but they are.
“It’s just paper and glue,” Huffman said. “The Cricut machine makes all the cuts and the perforations, it’s really easy. By the time I got a couple of them done, I could make a whole house in less than a day.”
The buildings were created off of a pattern Huffman downloaded from the internet, and they not only provided the “blueprints” for the building, but included features like a trap door in the back, where you could add battery-powered LED lights, which gave a soft glow to the house or church, adding to the ambience.
The houses, combined with businesses like a pizzeria and a “Burger Barn” look like they could part of any small-town Christmas. Huffman says that’s exactly the point, and the next project they do will hopefully be even closer to home: replicas of current and historic Sapulpa buildings. They hope to start looking hard at that early next year.
Using the library’s Cricut machine to make your own Christmas village is completely free, you’ll just need to purchase your own materials. One of the biggest benefits of the machine is that it’s so inexpensive to create. “Most of these houses were created for between $3 to $5,” Huffman said. “That big house cost me about $20, but only because it’s so big and there’s so much to it.”
Anyone interested in using the machine (or any other tool at the Dewey STEM Studio) can call the library at 918-224-5624 and schedule it for 2-hour increments. Librarians like Huffman can provide assistance for any first-timers, but she encourages everyone to give it a try.
“You’re really only limited by your own imagination,” she says. “We’ve made so many things using these machines, it really seems like there’s nothing it can’t do.”
