Sharing Farm is proud to present its 6th Annual Garlic Festival, the largest in Metro Vancouver. Taking place August 24th, this free event will have fun for the whole family along with cooking demos, great food, exhibitors, live entertainment and more – including garlic ice cream.
Photo credit: The Sharing Farm
New this year is the addition of Graphic Illustrator Sam Bradd. Through the magic of art, draw two important questions: What does a healthy and well-fed community look like? What does garlic mean in your home?
Over 1,000 pounds of fresh garlic will be available for sale with farm fresh produce, Steveston Pizza will have a special creation cooking up in the cob oven, Earnest Ice Cream will supply the garlic ice cream, 4Cats Art Studio will have a garlic-theme community painting, there will be an expanded area for kids, music, and farm tours.
Stop by the Garlic Festival at Terra Nova Park (2631 Westminster Hwy, Richmond) between 10:00am and 3:00pm on Sunday, August 24, 2014. Parking and bike valet are free. Admission is by donation to Sharing Farm.
The Sharing Farm grows food to feed Richmond families in need. The Farm is run by community members for community members, and is dedicated to providing fresh, healthy, local produce to our less fortunate neighbours. The Sharing Farm operates on a tiny budget, but thanks to the generosity of our over 1,000 yearly volunteers and the devotion of a small core of part-time staff, the Farm is able to provide thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables every year to community meals throughout the city and the Richmond Food Bank.
Find out more about the festival and The Sharing Farm by following along on Twitter and Facebook.
I Love Transit Week is coming up August 25th to 29th. Allen Tung of The Buzzer Blog has contributed the following post to promote this year’s campaign. You can find out more by following Translink on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and The Buzzer Blog.
One week each year, we celebrate what we love about transit and I Love Transit Week is back August 25th to 29th! For this year’s celebrations, we’ll be sending ten kids, aged 8 to 12, and their parent or guardian to I Love Transit Camp for a special behind-the-scenes tour of SkyTrain, SeaBus, and much more on Tuesday, August 26th.
We will visit the SkyTrain Operations and Maintenance Centre (OMC) where we’ll see where the vehicles are maintained and cleaned as well as SkyTrain Control. We’ll also visit the SeaBus maintenance docks by Waterfront Station and we’ll have the chance to head up to the bridge and speak to the captain of the SeaBus!
Inside the SkyTrain OMC and the SeaBus docks.
Afterwards, we’ll have some fun on a 40-foot bus and talk to an operator instructor to find out what it’s like to drive a bus. Finally, we’ll meet up with Transit Police and maybe even Transit Security to learn more about everything they do. I’m told they’ll be bringing their vehicles and a special guest if we are lucky.
I Love Transit Camp
If you and your child are interested in this fun day on transit, get your application in now in two easy steps:
- 1. We’ll need the kids to tell us in 50 words or less what that they love about transit.
- 2. Email that to [email protected] with “I Love Transit Camp” in the subject by August 19, 2014.
If you like, you can also include a photo and/or video as part of your entry. Be sure to include the name, age, and phone number of the participant and parent or guardian.
What about those who are no longer kids but who are still young at heart? They can join in the fun too. We are going to have a vintage bus in downtown Vancouver from the Transit Museum Society (TRAMS). Take pictures, explore our transit past, free pins, bus and SkyTrain cutouts and more. This will take place Monday, August 25th at the EasyPark lot at Cambie Street and Georgia Street from 11:00am to 2:00pm.
And as usual, The Buzzer blog will be packed with contests, interviews, essays, submissions from Buzzer readers sharing just why they love transit!
Have you shared your transit love with us? Tweet it with the hashtag #ILoveTransit or email it to [email protected]. We’ll feature as many as we can on the Buzzer blog! See staff doing a great job? Let us know by going to translink.ca/feedback and filling out a commendation form.
White Spot’s Celebrate BC summer menu features local ingredients, seasonal dishes, and BC wine features to round out your inspired dining experience. Perfect pairing suggestions include the Lois Lake Steelhead with Warm Crispy BC Potato Salad alongside a glass of Red Rooster Pinot Gris. How about the Prawn & BC Brie Flatbread with Inniskillin Riesling or the Gala Apple & BC Brie Chicken Burger with Jackon-Triggs Rosé?
For a limited time you can also enjoy a Legendary Burger, Caesar Salad & Fresh BC Blueberry Pie for only $12.99.
Until September 7th, the Celebrate BC menu offer six seasonally-inspired creations including my favourite, the Candied Salmon Spinach Salad. White Spot uses more local ingredients than any other full service restaurant chain in the province and proudly offers a 100% BC VQA wine list. Cheese from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks, blueberries from Silver Valley Farms in Maple Ridge, heirloom tomatoes from Windset Farms in Delta, and more.
Celebrate BC at White Spot
To help you Celebrate BC at your local White Spot, I have a $50 gift card to give away along with a trio of featured BC wine from Red Rooster, Inniskillin, and Jackson-Triggs. Here’s how you can enter to win:
- Leave a comment on this post (1 entry)
- Post the following on Twitter (1 entry)
The bottles of wine will be delivered to the winner along with the gift card. I will draw one winner at random from all entries at 12:00pm on Thursday, August 21, 2014. Must be 19+. Please enjoy responsibly. Follow White Spot on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date on their latest menu offerings and promotions.
Update The winner is Steve!
There are some great Vancouver entertainers but to me, it’s tough to beat the legendary Dal Richards. Richards is a big band leader, radio host, performer, lyricist, and much more to the many who he has touched with his music and spirit for the better part of the last century. This year marks his 75th consecutive annual performance at The Fair at the PNE, where he has delighted fairgoers with his jazz, rock, and pop every summer. It’s an honour to feature Dal Richard in today’s archive photo collection:
1944: Dal Richards and his orchestra at the Burrard United Service Centre. Archives# CVA 586-3125. Photographer: Donn B.A. Williams.
1946: Dal Richards and his band playing the Lady Luck Revue at The Orpheum. Archives# CVA 1184-2313.
1960: Dal Richards leading his band in the PNE Parade down Hastings. Archives# 2008-022.137. Photographer: Leslie F. Sheraton.
1976: Dal Richards at the PNE. Archives# 2010-006.283. Photographer: Ernie H. Reksten.
1976: Dal Richards at the PNE. Archives# 2010-006.282. Photographer: Ernie H. Reksten.
Upcoming Event Info
The Fair at the PNE’s Music Mosaic Series on the Chevrolet Performance Stage:
Dal Richards with Featured Guest Michael Kaeshammer
Saturday, August 16, 2014 at 7:30pm & 9:00pm
Dal Richards with Featured Guest Bria Skonberg
Thursday, August 21, 2014 at 7:30pm & 9:00pm
Less is more, especially when it comes to stripping away thousands of square feet from an iconic stadium and creating a memory-triggering graphic that has caught the attention of thousands of fans — and Major League Baseball. S. Preston Art + Designs has created a wildly popular Minimalist Ballpark graphic series that went viral online and can now be seen hanging on the walls of Target Field in Minneapolis, among others.
I caught up with my longtime friend Preston shortly after he moved back to Vancouver from Los Angeles, where he had been working for the last two years, to talk about the success of the ballpark series.
“I’ve been graphic designing for so many years for corporate clients and I love sports. Finally I merged the two together and it’s come out into something that everyone sort of loves right now.” Preston said once the designs for all 30 stadiums were complete last year, he put them online and found that they went viral really quickly. The first major outlet to pick them up was USA Today, followed by Sports Illustrated, ESPN and then Deadspin, which he credits as being the tipping point.
Preston at Target Field in Minneapolis
“It just blew up from there. Christmas was great, I was in a couple of gift guides and then the next big call was probably Target Field calling to say they wanted my whole display put up in the concourse of the stadium.” While preparing the artwork, frames, files, and everything else needed to install his collection on the walls of one of his featured ballparks he got a call from Major League Baseball. “They said they wanted to bring me under their license and that they thought it would go over really well with baseball fans.”
It was at that point that Preston realized the quality of what he had produced, and it became bigger than he had ever dreamed.
“You get really worried, especially as an artist you can get really negative and apprehensive about your own stuff. You’re not sure if people will like it but it turned out to be a massive success.” He was soon invited to set up a booth at the MLB All Star game this year, which was also happening in Minneapolis.
“I finally kind of have an idea of what I have now. I do have art and I have something that people immediately connect to. It’s sublime and subtle. It really just hits home.”
“People who saw the display in Target Field were able to come to me at the All Star game, see the artist, meet the artist, and buy their print from me and get it signed. That was the coolest thing. The stars aligned.”
During the All Star FanFest he met fans of all ages who appreciated the way that his artwork made them feel. He even had a fan come up to him and admit that he missed the first three inning of the game looking at his art in the concourse.
Preston also met a teenage girl who had just completed a stadium pilgrimage, visiting 30 stadiums in the last 30 days. “They’re buying one of each, one for every stadium that they go to and they just ask me to sign the date they visited.”
Right now his designs are the very first stop on the tours given at Target Field and he’s also had a math teacher tell him he uses his work as a teaching tool with his students, based on its minimalist expression. He said it connects to people on many levels. First as a guessing game, then on a personal level, but also as living room-worthy art.
[Editor's Note: I have to admit that I was never a fan of baseball until John and I watched all 10 innings of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary through the course of a rainy summer in Vancouver. It wasn't the actual sport that I came to appreciate, it was the history, which is one of the reasons why the Vancouver Canadians are so endearing.
Watching the documentary, memories flooded back as I remembered playing ball in a dirt field in Fort Langley and I recalled all of my favourite baseball movies, the ones that really made me feel something. I then read BC author W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe because I wanted to connect to the story upon which the film Field of Dreams was based. In recent years I also played catch with John at the Field of Dreams movie site in Iowa, near where he grew up. Then, Preston's minimalist version of Fenway Park, with the Citgo sign peeking over the Green Monster, made me think of the year I spent in Boston.]
Preston told me that the idea for the series actually started with Boston. “I always has this vision of the Citgo sign and the Green Monster. That one to me is truly minimalist. It’s truly abstract and minimalist, and it hits that mark. If you get it, you get it. If you’re not a fan you don’t understand.”
The hardest for him to complete was Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. as the trigger image really has nothing to do with the stadium itself. “I went on Twitter and people said the president races are such a memorable part of the stadium experience so I decided I would do that.”
Going forward, he will continue to develop other minimalist graphic series and I’m not-so-secretly hoping a new Miss604.com header will make its way onto his “To Do” list. He actually designed the current version of this fair website’s main banner a few years ago and was the first to make a digital, minimalist version of the new BC Place when it reopened in 2011.
S. Preston Art + Designs is currently offering a limited edition gallery wrap print canvas print for $395 (size 16×24) and a larger one for $800 (20×28). To make sure the art is accessible to all fans, there are 81/2x11 prints for $35 and 13×19 prints for $60. “I want to make sure that fans can buy it but also that collectors out there have something art worthy, unique, and special. I’m trying to feed both markets.”
Win a Print
Preston has offered up a 13×19 print for one lucky reader who will be able to select any ballpark they desire. Here’s how you can enter to win:
- Leave a comment here about what else, baseball! (1 entry)
- Post the following on Twitter (1 entry)
I will draw one winner at random from all entries at 12:00pm on Friday, August 22, 2014. Follow S. Preston Designs on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for the latest print updates.
Update The winner is Mandeep!
