This is your brain on Art....

I am getting ready to go to the east coast for a week or so, but as I do laundry, pack, and run errands, my brain has been busy thinking of what to put on the loom when I get home. I have three more calendar tapestries to design and weave; April, July, and December. I think these three months have been the hardest for me, because they are months that have strong associations for me, and I'm not sure if I want to 'go with' those associations, or not. April is my birth month, July seems to bring up images of fireworks and patriotism, and of course December is just all Christmas.

April has also become an 'Owl month' for us. We hear the western screech owls in our neighborhood for the first time of the year, with open night windows, and we watch the nesting owls  bring forth their owlets along the river. So I have been considering owls for the April tapestry. But look at all that nesting 'stuff' to weave! I have woven areas that fiddley before, but I'm not sure that I want to again.

I have also been considering several other images for April (based on sketches and some other things I don't want to share yet,) and I have this month to gather more ideas and images, since it is, in fact, April. I don't want to go with flowers, which would be an obvious choice, with the world around me in bloom, but the March tapestry is floral.

Anyway, right in the middle of my brain wandering around the April tapestry, these images came to mind. They were actually shot in the summer at the lake where our cabin is. I guess I thought of them because Sandhill Cranes are flying over, and we did have several pairs of cranes at the lake last summer... so that made me think of the herons, which are always there, and I remembered taking these photos. I have loved the challenge of weaving water, and would like to do it again. So now, I am thinking of the July tapestry, as the lake is usually still frozen over in April, so this wouldn't work at all for that month's tapestry!

The water in the image above would be very weavable, just with the usual tapestry techniques. And I love the reflection of the heron. But the water in the image below actually looks textural to me, though I would need to figure out how to weave it to look that way. Would color blending and eccentric line work be the way to go? That sounds even more fiddley than the owl's nest! Or could color blending and some twill tapestry be used?

All these things are working their way through my head today, as I try to check off things on my lengthy ToDo list:

Go to grocery store (hmmmm, that water has a somewhat cross hatched look. I wonder if there is something in Collingwood's book that would help produce that effect?)

Change sheets and clean the upstairs (The sett would need to be changed from foreground to background, too, so this is beginning to sound like something that would need to be woven on my four-harness loom)

Finish up laundry  (Would two extreme values of blue, worked eccentrically with some line work produce enough texture?)

Guitar lesson  (If I do a 4-harness twill would the texture be too regular? How could I make it more eccentric?)  Sorry, I did mean that to be a C7 chord!

Should I pack for winter or spring? (What about a textured yarn blend?)

Anyway.... you know what I mean! I am just NOT going to allow the December tapestry to enter my head! Two tapestries vying for my attention is quite enough to distract me at the moment.

On with the ToDo list, with my brain on Art....