These African animals are well-traveled, yet they've never left Butler County.

The elephant, giraffe, rhino, lion and gazelle as well as the zebras, monkeys and hippos were created with packing materials in the hands of Sheryl Buffington and Freda Schoch, both of Butler. The women created the animals to illustrate a wildlife theme at a joint vacation Bible school.

Buffington said she must have made two or three trips to area furniture stores for the free boxes.

"I saw this cardboard piece and I thought, 'Oooh. I could use that for something,'" Schoch recalled. That shape of cardboard, some kind of corner protector for a large piece of furniture or appliance, lent itself perfectly to use as giraffe's legs.

The elephant's hide is made of the flat foam from inside a packing box. And fortunately, area residents bought some hutches earlier this year because both the elephant and rhino are based on the unique cardboard U-shape that was fitted around them.

"We used rope for tails, painted rope," Schoch said "The giraffe is two long boxes, I don't know what they were for. We attached the legs with pipe cleaners, and toilet paper tubes with pompoms for ears."

The giraffe towers over even grownups, but still it's light enough for one person to carry. "People look at them and think they're going to be really heavy but they're not," Buffington said.

The volume of the three-dimensional animals was getting large though, so the herd was finished off with some flat characters like the gazelle, zebras, lion and monkeys. The hippos might be flat, but their heads stick up out of the water: i.e., a dark piece of carpet.

"We tried to make them all durable because we knew the kids were going to want to touch them," Buffington said.

"We did this because my church, Trinity Lutheran, and Grace@Calvary churches had vacation Bible school together and the theme was The Serengeti, Wild About God."

The children at VBS seemed to be wild about the cardboard and foam animals, especially the 8-foot-tall, spotted giraffe and the monkeys hanging upside down, she added.

Since that week of VBS in mid-June, the animals have traveled to St. Paul Roman Catholic Church's VBS, which had a safari theme, and then to Camp Creation, the multi-week community Bible camp being held at the Island playground.

"Another church in West Sunbury asked to borrow them but they didn't because they said they were afraid the animals would get messed up," Buffington said.

Buffington called Schoch the "visionary artist" of the project.

"I can look at a piece of a thing and cut away what's not necessary. I've always been able to do that," Schoch said.

"We do a lot of art here," she said of the daycare and preschool at Trinity, where both women work. "Art's one of my favorite things."

The whole project probably took 50 to 60 hours over a couple of weeks to complete, Buffington and Schoch agreed. "Lots of staying after school," Schoch said.

"We started with the elephant. We were just going to do an elephant," Buffington said. "Then we went on to a giraffe, and Barb (Trinity's VBS leader) wanted a rhinoceros. It just flourished from there. But it was a blast. We had a lot of fun."

"Sheryl didn't know how much the head VBS person and I had talked. We had a master plan," Schoch said.

They also painted a background, approximately 6 feet by 20 feet with a big tree in foreground, but that doesn't travel.

"She worked from sight. She didn't trace anything," Buffington said of her accomplice in the project.

"Sheryl brings out the best in me. We work well together," Schoch said.

The daycare children helped, too - mostly with painting.

"We looked in a book and there are three different kinds of stripes for zebras," Schoch noted. "Even the spots on the giraffe, there are some closer together and some farther apart and blotchy."

Schoch said she got ideas about the animals from the kids. "We'd talk about the animals and how they had gone to the zoo. It got them talking," she said.

"Every afternoon the kids would grab their moms and dads to show them what was done, what they were helping with. I like seeing the kids faces when they see something come together from different things."

Besides being very productive, Schoch said she gained a lot of experience from the project.

"I learned a lot about cardboard. The thicknesses of it and how it will stand up," she said. "I learned a serrated knife works better than scissors or an Xacto knife - and faster, to cut cardboard. I learned that furniture packing boxes for hutches make a dandy elephant."

Incidentally, cardboard takes paint differently than paper.

"Once you put the paint on, you were going with that because it sucked the paint right in. It would lighten or darken a little, If I could still see the words (on the cardboard box), I'd paint it again," Schoch said.

The giraffe had to be covered in paper for it to be pale yellow, however.

The Traveling Serengeti, as Buffington calls it, will end up living at Trinity.

Buffington plans to use the animals in the fall to teach the ABCs at her preschool, Sheryl Buffington's Preschool and Daycare Palace, downstairs in the Trinity building.

"Our motto is 'We care, we share, we play, we learn,'" Buffington said. "This is part of our sharing, letting other people borrow the animals."