This is a very long post!
Scroll to the end to see a finished book art sculpture!
A month ago I found this carved wooden bird in a plastic bag (with some other oddities) hanging on a wall hook at Goodwill. $3.49 for the whole bag.
Stupidly, I walked away and left the bag on the wall. The bird was pretty, but I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it.
***
A day later, I woke up from this dream:
I stand on a flat, sandy golden desert plain, with scattered groves of green mesquite trees around me. It’s noon. The shadows of the trees are almost lapis blue against the gold sand.
I hold the same wooden bird in my hands, her head pointing away from me, due north.
My attention is drawn to the horizon. Formerly clear, stormclouds are building in the distance.
I look down at the wooden bird. Now she has leather wings tooled and painted with clouds. As I watch, kingfisher-blue patterned fabric pages shaped like wings fill the space between the open leather…covers?
This is a book! Building itself in my hands!
Dark green and lapis blue cords weave pages to covers, covers to the bird’s back.
The wood bird now has turquoise inlaid eyes, inlays of amber and turquoise vines along her body.
Blue and dark green fringes sprout along the trailing edges of the bird’s wings, carrying sparks of multicolored glass beads, enameled brass bells, and clear crystal beads that look like rain.
Rain-like tassels fall from the cords binding the wings to the body.
Stormclouds are closer, darker, trailing rain. There’s hot blue sky overhead.
But the smell of petrichor, the scent of water on dry earth and stone, is first coming from the bird in my hands.
I wake up.
The first thing I think is: I need to build this book.
The second thing: there’s an art show call for entry that would be *perfect* for this piece…but I have only a month to build it.
The third thing: I need that bird.
***
I can carve it myself, but I want *that bird*. It’s the one I dreamed.
Miraculously, the plastic bag is still untouched at Goodwill!
Maybe not so miraculous. I’ve worked as a sorter at Goodwill. Lots of small-sized or lower-value items are often randomly or theme packaged together in clear plastic bags, & stapled shut with a hang-tag for the Home Decor or Arts & Crafts wall section. These bags get dusty & crinkled within a few days (hours!), further obscuring contents.
That’s the *point*, to make you buy a lot of other stuff at a time in hopes that One Interesting Thing is as good as you think it might be.
I’m very skilled at seeing through those bags. On duplicitous occasions when I don’t have enough money to buy immediately, I’ve even moved the Interesting Thing to the center of the bag to obscure it. (Yes, I am that asshole. Nothing’s stopping you from taking the bag off the hook and looking closer.)
In the $3.49 bag with the wooden bird: a clear glass votive candle holder, and an astonishingly ugly penguin statue carved out of yellow-varnished cow horn hot-glued with some rocks to a wood base.
The penguin was the most visible item in the bag. I was lucky I’d even seen the wooden bird behind it!
***
Now I had the wooden bird.
Serendipity, the rest of the bag is not a waste of money.
The glass candle holder fits this lantern I got at another Goodwill ($2.49, will have green beaded vines.)
I can clean and repurpose the cowhorn penguin. Its base hides a happy surprise: among the random hot-glued rocks are some *very nice* rough red agates and pink petrified wood!
But I set those aside. Gotta think about the bird book.
***
What is she? Obviously, something about summer in the desert and rain season (common theme for me, see these sandals from 2020).
Within the next day I had a short poem:
‘Cicadas herald summer light / Trees hoard secret shade / Mirages silver every plain / Dry sunsets flare and fade / Storm clouds ring salt-blue sky / As Sun Bird dreams of rain.’
Good, I have a title!
And then a sketch, dated May 8, 2023. I think I know mostly how to build this book.
Now comes the hard work. Ideas and sketches are fun, but they don’t yield a physical piece.
Wooden bird, meet paint stripper & sanding to remove old cracking varnish. Underneath it, she smelled like walnut wood and had gorgeous grain.
I drilled three vertical holes through the bird’s back, using as the center the half-drilled hole that formerly held the sculpture atop a wire or stick.
I decided not to do woodburned designs, or the deeply cut Mayan-inspired turquoise and amber vine inlays.
I only had one bird.
Chances are too strong I’d mess up, and I have other projects to try this look. (I really want to buy this Mexico artisan’s work, it’s very worth the $400+ for this necklace. Look close at the turquoise chip inlay on the amber!) 
For ‘Sun Bird’ I cone-drilled eye holes and a spiraling vine pattern in tiny dots. Those were inlaid with turquoise chips and a powdered turquoise resin mix.
While working, I anchored the bird on a bamboo chopstick.
Once the resin dried for a couple of days, I sanded it down to the wood surface with progressively finer sandpaper. Then varnished with multiple coats of General’s Salad Bowl varnish (non toxic when dry, accents gorgeous satiny shimmery woodgrain.)
Sweet. She’s looking good, my ‘Sun Bird’.
A closer view:
Now on to covers. I cut out heavy tooling-grade cowhide and carved the first stylized stormclouds on the wings. Even here on a pre-varnish shot, the layout looks great.
Here are the cover fronts with verdigris acrylic paint cleaned with alcohol to keep the stain in the crevices. 
The inside cover with the desert landscape from my dream, hand painted in acrylic and toned down with a milky cream-pink wash.
Once dried, the wing-covers gained several all-over costs of Delta Ceramcoat Satin varnish, which I love for leather.
Those all had to dry for a week.
Time for fabric pages!
Due to a contracted project change from 2020, I have *a lot* of applique constructed fabric in mostly blue tones. I used some of it in ‘Talisman Scarf’ last year, to back the text tag dangles.
This time, I used strips of that fabric on the non-text back side of the wings.
For the poem side, I chose milky blue linen and sand-gold cotton prints, with hand-embroidered text in mingled rust/purple embroidery thread to give a mahogany look.
Once embroidered, I put the two sides together and edged each page in machine satin-stitch with Coats & Clark’s ‘Teaberries’ multicolor cotton thread. Then by hand I whip-stitched mingled rust and lapis blue embroidery thread over the machine stitch.
The front edges of the wings are bare. The tops got seed bead accents in vintage multicolor striped glass or crystal clear glass (the latter sometimes called ‘sugar beads’). This mimicked the look of condensation I saw in the dream.
The wings’ back edges have the dark blue and green rain fringe with multicolored glass, clear glass, and clear rock crystal beads.
How to bind this book? I originally drilled three holes on the anchor-edge of the covers, for a Coptic style binding of cords woven across an exposed spine of signatures. (A signature in bookbinding is a set of gathered folded pages.) But that might be too fragile for the three cords binding the wings to the body.
I needed a tape binding where the signatures were sewn onto a backing strip, then each side of that was sewn to the inside of a cover. The anchor cords will pass through pages, spine, wood bird, and anchor beads.
Which meant drilling more holes in the leather covers, and making this wing-shaped fabric spine tape.
Here are the pages gathered together but not yet sewn to the spine.
The last clear view of the covers and spine, once sewn together.
Here is ‘Sun Bird’, with everything linked together. Those long strings will carry heavy tassels.
Open wings!
It took six hours just to knot beads into these three 4″ tassels.
The inside front cover, with hand-inked text over the painting. Back cover carries my name, the date, and materials used.
Mostly final views of ‘Sun Bird’.
Very close to my dream, given the real-world design choices I had to make.
Still to do: add shell sequins to the inside of the wing spine ‘endpapers’.
Buy or find in The Stash three copper/bronze lobster clasps that will clip on the tassel heads.
Decide if two tiny copper bells make a good sound. I’ve had these bells for three years; if they chime properly, I want them on ‘Sun Bird’.
Rig a bronze cage pendant I already have with a scent-infused terra cotta bead (also owned). I’ll order some of Demeter’s ‘Petrichor’ perfume for the terracotta. I’ll photograph ‘Sun Bird’ with bells and perfume pendant, but ship the latter in a heavy plastic bag *if* the book gets juried into the show. I don’t want the scent component intruding, if the gallery doesn’t want it.
Rig a hanging option that will 1) help me photograph the piece and 2) help the gallery show it.
ENTER THE SHOW. It’s an online entry and I only have until midnight June 9, 2023.
I’m not worried if it doesn’t get juried in to this show. My art agents will probably jostle for it, and there’s a show entry this fall that I might try for. I also have a larger ulterior motive that I’ll share later (if it happens).
Last to make: a padded fabric carrying bag for all of this. Possibly incorporating in the cover flap the above needlepoint from 1996.
‘Sun Bird Dreams of Rain’ has given me a wild month. If magic works in this universe, this is one of a few Artifact-class pieces I’ve made. A lot of hope and horror got layered into it over the last month. I *hope* it is a thing of peace and joy.
I can take years to make a book art piece from idea to finish, so to do it in a month is a little mind boggling for me.
Thanks for following along!