ST. PAUL — A Minnesota-based artist is preparing to unfurl a mile-long book across a St. Paul bridge.

Sarah Stengle and volunteers will stretch out her chain of 32,000 pages of folded paper during the Art on the Avenue festival Saturday. The paper squares look like a book when folded and like garland when stretched.

Stengle lives in St. Paul and works in artists’ books and sculptural objects. She says the book project includes pages from old books, accounting paper and kids’ drawings.

Stengle said she expects it to reach halfway across the High Bridge this year and to the other end by 2015.

She said it will take about 500 hours to fold the whole book.