Chickadees flit through the chicory as wrens weave through rugosa, and monarchs quake the milkweed with each tremor of their small wings. But this isn’t where the wild things are — rather, it’s Periwinkle Studio in the Arts District of Oak Bluffs.

Judy Drew Schubert, the owner, opened her gallery to the public three weeks ago, giving these creatures the gift of flight and of widespread appreciation.

Eleven-year-old Sophie Donohue doesn’t have far to travel for the Community Sing each week. During the summer she lives with her family in the Oak Bluffs Camp Ground. Sophie’s Vineyard experience could be described as a time to swim, sail and, of course, sing.

On Wednesday, July 20, at the third Community Sing of the summer, Sophie mingled with the crowd. “I’m waiting for my friends,” she explained. “We come every week to sing together.”

First, let it be said that on the evening this critic attended the Vineyard Playhouse’s outdoor performance of The Comedy of Errors, Friday, July 22, when the weather was so warm it felt as if the entire Island was holding a Bikrum hot yoga class (for those unfamiliar with the workout, the purpose is to reproduce a boiling afternoon in Calcutta), the heat itself became a starring character.

Cynthia McGrath has always followed her heart — and at one point, the Grateful Dead. “I had started beading before college as a hobby,” Mrs. McGrath recalled in a telephone interview. “It was a way to make enough money follow the Dead around. That’s how it started in the very, very beginning. I was a little hippie and I would make these beaded necklaces I had made on a piece of velvet cloth. People would come and buy my stuff and then later on I’d get to see them dancing, wearing my stuff.

In an ever more digitized world, Mitzi Pratt and Flip Scipio still work by hand. On separate levels of their two-story Moshup Trail studio, these artisans rely not on machines but on their knowledge, skill and experience. Though their mediums are different — Ms. Pratt is a bookbinder and Mr. Scipio makes guitars — their work sometimes overlaps, each feeding the other’s.

Chilmark artist Jules S. Worthington believes the creativity that drives him is fundamental. It is the breath of life, in good times and not so good times.

His home off Tea Lane overflows with signs of it. Every wall, from the kitchen to the den, has his paintings on display. They are bright, big and colorful.