I Like #301

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

This week I really enjoyed getting to go to a concert by the Windsong Chamber Choir.  It was gorgeous and ethereal.  Such beautiful blending music.  Really amazing.  I went because a friend of mine has a daughter who was accompanying one piece on her cello but now I want to try to go to more of their concerts.  So so moving.

The pups are good,  lots of snuggles and some walks! 

My garden is growing so that's good, I spent most of saturday doing yard work which was exciting as now the yard is nice and tidy.  One of the undergraduate students in my lab is leaving to go to graduate school and she brought me this lovely orchid as a present!  I've never grown orchids before, so hopefully I can keep it alive.

I also like getting to work in my studio.  I'm working on a new piece using some plastics out of my recycling, so I've been cutting and cleaning little bits.  I also kept getting annoyed by things stuck inside my National Park Passport book so I made a quick little cover for it out of some scrap leather I'd picked up somewhere (it was a grab bag of small scraps I picked up a few years ago and I thought I'd incorporate some into my quilts but hadn't yet done anything with it).

Hope you're all having a good week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #300

Welcome to another week of things to like!  I'm still behind on blogging about various projects,  I haven't been super productive and of course the spring was pretty much a wash artistically, but there are still some things I hope to share before too long!  Anyway, for now we just have a weekly update!

This weekend was our last OKC Philharmonic show of the year.  The orchestra played a new piece commissioned to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of Clara Luper, an Oklahoma Civil Rights activits.  The piece was amazing, beautiful musically, with a huge choral component and a wonderful interplay between narration by Clara Luper's daughter and a wonderful guest soprano.  Really wonderful.  I was also really excited because the recording that the OKC Phil did of Jonathan Leshnoff's music (I mentioned that last week) is out now!  It's a fantastic cd, and is also available for download on itunes.  The whole album is great, but as I mentioned last week, I'm especially fond of the violin concerto.

Saturday was also graduation, the first in person since the pandemic.  My PhD program had six students who graduated this year, including one student from my lab.  Three of them participated in graduation and it was wonderful to be there with them and their mentors to celebrate and participate in the hooding.  OU gave us graduation regalia, but I had my U of A hood.  The OU gown was kind of rinkydink so I've been thinking about making my own for future years.  Weirdly there isn't much out there in the way of patterns etc.  

On Tuesday we got to go listen to a friend of mine who sings folk songs play at a local Irish pub.  It was really a lovely time too.  He has a great repertoire.

It's been raining non-stop, so everything is waterlogged.  Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday were clear so I hoped things would get to dry out some but this morning it was raining again.  My petunias are happy though.

The pups are fine, mostly just bringing as much mud in the house as possible.

LeeAnna's prompt for this week was:"have you ever had a close encounter with a celebrity? Seen someone in person, talked to them, etc?  please tell us the details!"  The only celebrity I've ever encountered was Neil Patrick Harris.  He went to the same church as my family when I was very young, and as a early elementary kid I was in the Christmas pageant with him.  Very shortly thereafter his family moved to Albuquerque, but it was fun for us to watch him become famous after that!

I hope everyone is hanging in there this week!  For more things to like, head over to LeeAnna's!

I Like #299

Good morning!  Welcome to another week of things to like!  This was, overall a good week.  I got to enjoy being home from my travels and also got to go down to Dallas to see my sister on Saturday.  It was so good to see her, I hadn't seen her since Christmas, which for us is a long time.

It was the weekend of my niece's dance recitals and my nephew was playing in the championship game for his youth baseball league so it was super fun to get to go to those events.

His team won the game and I got to see him make a great hit, and then later in the evening we spent some time hanging out and playing games.  Their puppy Kubota (who they rescued from my parent's town last Christmas) is such an adorable dog.  She loves tug-o-war and will play with people or other dogs.

Nothing super exciting is happening in my garden, although I did catch up on some much delayed yardwork this weekend too and it was nice to be outside! My giant bush is blooming though and I always love when it does, it smells so wonderful.  I cut a few branches and brought them inside, the little white flowers are lovely.

And I saw another pretty rose at church!

I'm so grateful for my art friends.  This week I got two fun surprises in the mail from them.  My friend Helena sent me a wonderful thread portrait of Spooky that is paired with one I have of her dog Olive.  It's so special and I hung it up in my office right next to Olive.

And then I received this wonderful children's storybook about an armadillo from my friend Kathy.  I think I'm turning into the armadillo lady!!!

My pups are good too, lots of sunbathing for them this week.

LeeAnna's prompts this week were about our favorite musical style.  I like lots of different kinds of music depending on the context.  I love classical music, and just a couple of years ago discovered a contemporary classical piece I love, Jonathan Leshnoff's Violin Concerto #2.  I love Bach organ music, all the mathematical intricacies.  I also love poppy bouncy music for cleaning and exercising, the sing-along kind with lots of hits from the 80s and 90s.  I love Brandi Carlile's music and the classics from the 60s and 70s, like Simon and Garfunkel and Gordon Lightfoot.  I don't usually like vocal music I can't sing along to.  

I hope everyone is hanging in there!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #298

Last week I was thrilled to spend the week in Toronto Canada for the annual SAQA Conference and board retreat.  It was the first in-person conference since before the pandemic and the first in-person one I'd attended since joining the board.

The whole experience was really fantastic.  It was just great to finally meet in person (or see again in person) so very many friends I'd mostly just seen on zoom.  The conference content was wonderful, in particular talks by Susan Avishai and Dorothy Caldwell. And on Saturday afternoon we had a chance to tour several fiber art and quilt exhibitions at the Campbell House Museum and the Textile Museum of Canada.  So great.  At some point I'd love to do a post about the exhibitions we saw.

I took lots of selfies with good friends, all wonderful artists as well.  And met up with lots of other great friends and artists who I didn't get pictures with!

With my wonderful roommate Jette Clover

With my friend Claire Passmore.  I was so excited to win her quilt in the spotlight auction.

With my friends Mel Beach and Jennifer Solon who are also the current SAQA board president and SAQA Assistant Executive Director

With Shannon Dion- I feel like we're the twin Shannon's of SAQA, she also makes lots of work inspired by faith, spirituality, and religion and 3D work!

With great friends Susan Lenz and Helena Scheffer.  Helena and I had such a good time hanging out and going on an adventure to a yarn store (we're both also knitters). 

And with the incomparable Zara Zanettino and Vivika DeNegre (ignore my stupid look)

We didn't have much time for touring around Toronto but we did get to walk around one evening and I was struck by the wonderful blend of building styles and the great reflections on buildings and the melted skating rink.

The two museums we got to visit were the Campbell House Museum which was showing Colour with a U, a SAQA exhibit of Canadian Artists.  The whole thing was wonderful, but I especially enjoyed seeing Susan Avishai's piece in person just after we had heard her talk.  Her work is entirely made from recycled mens shirting.

And at the Textile Museum we saw an amazing exhibit by Padina Bondar, an artist who has developed a mechanism for making thread from used plastic garbage bags with which she then tats, crochets, knits, etc. to make amazing artworks.

The conference was a great opportunity for knitting as well, and I made lots of progress on my current sweater project.

Of course it was sad to be gone from the pups, but they were fine and happy to see me on my return.

My garden still isn't doing a whole lot, it's growing but everything is small.  But baby crabapples are forming on my tree and I loved these roses blooming at our church.

This week's prompt from LeeAnna is about singing.  I've always loved to sing, I was always the girl scout or bible school participant who had all the verses memorized and wanted to sing all through car trips and hikes.  As a kid though I could never carry a tune at all, so it was interesting to say the least.  For most of my adult life I've sung in our church choir which means I've gotten much better, but I'm still definitely what you would call mediocre but enthusiastic!  I can sing well as part of a choir and usually hear my part (either alto or soprano depending on how many choir members we have at any given time), but am not the type to do a solo!

Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!