How To Make Birds Happy
Does anybody remember this book? It was one of my favorites as a kid (maybe you can tell by how well-loved it looks). I was looking for a book today and stumbled across this amazing book, and looked through it for a moment, reliving the wonderful feeling I got by even just looking at the illustrated instructions for such exciting crafts as "How to Make a Whirligig" (a pinwheel) or "How to Make a Stick-It Picture" (a collage) or this one, "How to make Birds Happy".
One of the reasons I loved this book so much was that I somehow could engage with the book--the illustrations showed me something in the book that I could make REAL in my world. Like many kids, I wanted to LIVE in the pictures I saw, so this was a way I could. I made many of the things suggested in here. As it happens, I think this book was WAY AHEAD of its time. There are many of us adults reliving many of these projects or creating our own versions of this book. Only, we don't have to ask our DADS to cut milk cartons. We can cut them ourselves, thank you.
posted by Summer Pierre at
1:46 PM
2 Comments:
I was not into making crafts as a young child. (I got more into crafts, as well as drawing/ painting, towards teenage years). But you've reminded me, I think I did like to live in some of the pictures in children's books. One of the books had stories for 365 days of the year, and one of the stories was a fantasy about the Land of Nod. It had illustrations that were very spooky. They were almost sweet & cheerful, but they had a creeped-out edge to them. It was like they took you to a fantastical dream land where you were almost wonderfully happy -- but at the same time there was a feeling of dread, because you feared you might never wake up. Maybe like Hotel California-- "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Or like a Twilight Zone feeling that "..things are not quite what they seem." I'm getting spooked out right now thinking about this. I'm pretty surprised I can remember it so well.
-- As for your next blog posting, where you say you have "NO PRINCE" do you mean as in the 'artist-formerly-known-as-then-not-known-as-but-now-known-again-as-PRINCE' "? I really love "1999" and his song about "there's joy in repetition." But, I think "I feel good (I got you)" (or whatever it's called) has an edge over "Sex machine"... so maybe you should try to have both, unless you also like "the hot pants"!
Ms Pierre,
I know this entry in your blog is over a year old, but holy ratfuck!-if you'll pardon my language.
Talk about stumbling across something you'd forgotten and suddenly feeling a rush of joyful memories come back to you.
Yes, I also liked this book when I was a young child. If I remember rightly, I didn't actually own it, but there was a well-used copy at my school.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
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