Old Lyme - Out on the grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum, a wooden pedestal stands empty, encircled in red velvet rope.

In an exhibition where 43 artists and artist teams were asked to create birdhouses based on famous fairy tales or fables, it appears at first glance that Christopher and Rhett Steiner have failed. There is no birdhouse to look at.

But wait - it's not really empty. The Steiners have cleverly borrowed the theme of the invisible clothes from "The Emperor's New Clothes" for their installation. The birdhouse is invisible to all those unworthy of seeing it.

In the days leading up to the opening of the museum's "Of Feathers & Fairy Tales: Enchanted Birdhouses at the Museum," the piece was not quite done. But David Rau, the museum's director of education and outreach, said visitors would find more than meets the eye when the piece was complete.

Literally.

Visitors who gather around "That's Strictly for the Birds" will hear a recording of people "talking about this thing that's not there," Rau said.

The Connecticut College art history professor's piece notwithstanding, visitors will be able to actually examine the dozens of birdhouses that make up the exhibition, which opened Oct. 1 and runs through the end of the month.

Rau started the annual fall exhibition on the museum grounds three years ago with "Wee Faerie Village" and followed it up last year with "Scarecrows at the Museum," which featured 32 scarecrows based on famous artists and their artwork.

Many of the artists in this year's birdhouses exhibition were invited back from the past two exhibitions. Not seeing the artwork before they're installed is a little nerve-wracking, but "it's all about completely trusting their artistic sensibilities," Rau said.

"It's like Christmas when they're installed," he said.

Among the adult artists' work is a piece by the students from Lyme Consolidated School, "The Three Little 'Peeps'" (also known as "When Pigs Fly"). With their teacher Helen McDonald, 26 fourth-grade students created a piece in which the three little pigs learned "the big, bad wolf wasn't really mean, but rather suffered from a severe case of allergies," according to the exhibition booklet.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Bill Vollers, a Chester artist and owner of the antiques store Chester Americana, was working on his piece, "Spinning a Golden Yarn," based on the fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin" about an impish creature who weaves straw into gold.

The elaborate piece is more sculpture than birdhouse, with various "found objects" such as wooden boxes, table and chair legs and even pieces of curtain rods melded together to house a tiny room in which the girl who supposedly weaves straw into gold sits amidst spools of woven gold.

Vollers even got his brother, Geoff Vollers of Maine, to build a miniature stained-glass window for the room.

The sculpture that encloses this scene is itself a larger version of that same scene, Vollers said.

"It's a scene within a scene," he said.

Newlyweds Steve Hansen and Julie Solz, of Amherst, N.H., chose to incorporate their setting into their artwork, "Thump!" Based on "The Wizard of Oz," the famed Kansas farmhouse has, in the couple's version, landed splat in the middle of the museum's rose garden.

The yellow brick road - landscape designer that he is, Hansen used pea gravel that he spray-painted and glittered to create the road - leads to a series of stairs to Emerald City, a bird cage that hangs near the last rung.

The crew at Erik Block Design-Build, which last year created a 20-foot tall wooden scarecrow, this year scaled down its piece to a more manageable size.

But what's the fun in building just one birdhouse? The crew, plus Block's wife Abby Block, built four houses for the characters of "The Chronicles of Narnia," with energy upgrades that include a wind turbine, solar panels and a dam.

The clean energy component of the artwork, called "Back Through the Wardrobe," ties into the design-build company's commitment to environmentally friendly building practices, said crew member Adam Pipkin.

But the White Witch "refused to do the energy upgrade," Pipkin said, and in her frozen tundra of a birdhouse is a metal pipe from Block's old furnace that spews off imaginary black smoke.

Even the neighboring businesses are joining in on the birdhouse fun. Visitors can "Follow the Feathers" to stores on Lyme Street and Halls Road to check out merchants' own birdhouses, then vote for their favorite.

j.cho@theday.com

IF YOU GO

Who: Florence Griswold Museum

What: "Of Feathers & Fairy Tales: Enchanted Birdhouses at the Museum"

When: Oct. 1 to Oct. 31. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; also open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 10 and Monday, Oct. 31

Where: 96 Lyme St. in Old Lyme

Admission: $14 adults, $13 seniors ages 62 and older, $12 students, $5 members. Children 12 and under are free.