When Cris Ruehle sits down for a paper-shredding session in her living room, it's not because she needs to destroy the evidence. It's just time to make a new batch of pulp for her bowls, vessels and wall art.

Ruehle, 49, has had a thing for papermaking since she was in the Girl Scouts in upstate New York, but she didn't plan to make a career out of it. She studied early childhood development and taught 2-year-olds for five years in Raleigh, where she moved 12 years ago. Her favorite part was making things with them. Then came a retail job, running the deli at Fresh Market on Kildaire Farm Road.

Meanwhile, she and her husband, Jim, an account executive with IBM Global Services, moved to Carpenter Village. In their new home, Ruehle wanted to find something big and beautiful to place atop a hutch in her new dining room.

"The ceiling is so high that it really needed something. I looked and looked, but couldn't find anything," she said. So she put her mother's motto into action: "You don't need to buy it if you can make it."

She had dabbled in making paper, but hadn't created much, she said. She mixed up some pulp and used a mold to form two large bowls. She gave them coats of metallic paint and then glued small red squares onto the surface, lending an almost Asian look to the finished piece.

One has a crack "because I was too impatient," Ruehle noted. But by lining the crack with metallic paint, she added depth and decoration, transforming her mistake into an art element.

"Those bowls are what really got me going to start this as a business," she said. "A couple of my friends came over to see them and one said, 'you could be selling these.'"

Ruehle discovered that her friend was right.

Her first art show was only a year ago, at Christmas Carousel Holiday Festival in Raleigh. Now she has almost a dozen shows under her belt, including ones in Richmond and Myrtle Beach, and she has back-to-back shows this weekend.

She and Jim bought a small trailer for hauling her merchandise and booth setup to the shows. He also designed a Web site for her and helps her with administrative work. The two just redesigned her booth, which they had set up in the living room to study and iron out the kinks.

The booth was filled with bowls and vessels, some covered in bright metallic paint and others with opaques. In one series of bowls, she affixed leaf skeletons to the inside, while others are made with paper pulp mixed with peanut shells.

"I was inspired after we had all these peanuts shells left over from a party. I thought, why not try it?' " she said.

From pulp to bowl

Ruehle set up her studio in the couple's garage, which now holds a large trash bin of shredded white paper and many smaller buckets of pulp. Sometimes, when she doesn't have time for the pulp to mix enough on its own, she'll speed up the process by using a large bit at the end of a drill, "like a big mixer."

She never has a shortage of paper, however.

"I have great neighbors who love bringing me bags and bags of office paper."

Ruehle rolls out the pulp mix for a smooth look or forms it by hand for a "mashed-potato" effect. After the pieces dry, which can take up to a week, she can apply paint if desired and add a protective coat of polyurethane.

Ruehle added a higher grade of coating when she heard from customers that they wanted to be able to wash the bowls in water.

"Frankly, I just didn't think people would want to put spaghetti in them," she said. But, indeed, some do.

Ruehle plans to work on bigger and more structurally complex pieces. Every day brings new ideas, she said, including the holiday tree ornaments she starting cranking out a few weeks ago.

She also wants to do more wall art, and enjoys the creativity involved.

One couple, Andy and Kathryn Jalbert, who saw Ruehle's work at Cary's Lazy Daze Arts & Crafts Festival in August, commissioned her to make a wall hanging for their bungalow, a 1932 Montgomery Ward kit home. The couple were happy with the mockup she created after visiting their home, and they're expecting the finished piece, to measure 30-by-24 inches, to be delivered soon.

"We really liked her work, the reuse of materials, and how she puts it together, with vibrant colors and textures," Andy Jalbert said. "We were also impressed with her prices of her work. We're in our early 30s and can't afford a lot."

Ruehle said her work does draw a lot of people to her booth, and she gets a kick out of seeing their reactions to the uncommon medium.

"They think it's pottery when they walk in. Then they go to pick it up and they think it's going to be heavy, and they go like this," she said, smiling and whooshing her arms up into the air. "One woman almost threw a bowl up in the air. That's why we have a roof on top of the tent."

Even then, they're not sure what they're holding, Ruehle said.

"They always want to be able to figure it out themselves, but then a lot of people say, 'OK, I give up. What's it made of?' When I tell them it's recycled office paper, then they're really excited."

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