Gone to the birds!

The theme for my local book arts group this month is crows. I stewed this one over for a long time and really struggled. One afternoon I went out and hit the craft stores in town on my very last stop I finally found something I was excited about. I stumbled onto a product marketed towards scrapbookers called In Stitch'z. They are little templates that you poke into you paper and then sew the design on paper. I found a great little bird and took the pack home with me.
I then promptly sat down poked all the holes realized that I didn't have a clue how to embroider and the directions that came with the pack said "use your favorite stitch". I didn't think rationally and go get my laptop to google a solution, nope I sat there and stumbled my way through figuring out away to make it work.
With a practice bird under my belt I started in on the final project. I had originally planned on sewing an accordion to make a more formal book structure but came across the Venetian Blind Book while flipping through Creating Handmade Books by Alisa Golden. It solved my problem of hiding the stitches on the back and looked like a fun structure to try out.
Each bird is sewn black embroidery thread and they sit on brown embroidery thread branches. The yellow paper accents is a thin handmade paper with some sort of long grass/fibers in it.
I think my next step is to try sewing one into book cloth.