Category: City Love

The Toronto Flower Market is This Sunday

flowers

The Toronto Flower Market now makes its home much closer to me – at 659 Queen Street East in Riverside. Their next monthly event is this Sunday, June 14.  I went last month and picked up the gorgeous dahlias and freesias in the picture above.

The market always features whatever is in season, so you know what that means… peonies!!! My friend Rosie tells me her adorable flower truck, Qt, will be full of beautiful white peonies for you to pick up.  Hot tip – get there early. The market opens at 10am, and the early bird gets the flower. Or however that’s supposed to go.

A Food Truck for Flowers in Toronto

StuffAveryLikesQT

My friend Rosie owns the amazing Quince Flowers in Toronto, and she’s just launched a super cool new service. It’s called Qt (which stands for Quince Truck, and if you say it fast enough it sounds like “cutie”, which is fun), and basically it’s like a food truck for market-fresh flowers.

Rosie’s team goes to the flower market early every morning, and posts their inventory on the website every day. You check the website to see what’s on the truck on any given weekday (no weekends), place an order online (before 2pm), and the truck will deliver the market-fresh flowers to your door later that same day. Or, if you see the Qt truck parked around Toronto, you can walk up and spontaneously order in person (kind of like an ice-cream or food truck).

You can also set up repeating orders for daily, weekly or monthly standing orders. Wouldn’t that be amazing, to get fresh flowers on the regular?!?

Bonus – if you sign up for the Qt email list, you’ll get a sweet discount off your first order.

Best Idea Ever: Toronto Grilled Cheese Festival

top_grillAndSoup

Next weekend there’s a Grilled Cheese Festival at Roy Thomson Hall.  A $40 ticket gets you all-you-can-eat grilled cheese, gourmet soup and 3 beer samples. Check out the menu of different grilled cheese sandwiches… I would love the Tatooed Chicked (with oka-style cheese, chicken, bacon, herbed tomato and garlic mayo)  or the Bacon Avocado (cheddar cheese, monterey jack cheese, bacon, avocado, spinach, red onion, tomato and garlic mayo).

Of course tickets for the festival are sold out… I didn’t hear about it early enough (boo).  But if you want to put your name on a waiting list, you can do so on the Grilled Cheese Fest website.  Or, be like me and have your own mini-grilled cheese festival at home.  Best idea I’ve had all day.

Advice from Creative Mornings

Creative Mornings Toronto

Do you know about Creative Mornings? It’s a FREE lecture series that happens one morning a month in cities around the world. Creative Mornings was started in NYC by my web hero swissmiss, and while the talks are aimed at the creative community, I think they really appeal to anyone.

Creative Mornings recently celebrated their 5-year birthday, and at their party, a number of people took the stage and gave short talks with advice. Check them out – they’re pretty great (and short).  The advice from Oliver Jeffers is sweet, with his adorable Irish accent. And Maria Popova’s 7 Things I Learned talk ties in to her blog post of the same topic, which I absolutely loved.

And, speaking of Creative Mornings, we have a chapter right here in Toronto. I try to attend each month – the talks are great, there’s free coffee, and it’s at 401 Richmond, right next to my favourite design bookstore Swipe. What’s not to love?

This month the Toronto chapter is celebrating their 2nd birthday, and will be presenting a special Creative Morning on Friday November 21.  Toronto Poet Laureate George Elliott Clark will be speaking on the topic of Bravery.  Tickets are available at 9am this morning (yep, today – Monday), and will probably go fast.  See you there!

[photo of Ilana Ben-Ari from last month’s Creative Mornings Toronto talk. You can see more pictures from Creative Mornings Toronto here on their Flickr page]

Make/Design/Shoot in Toronto – A Guide

Make Design Shoot - Toronto Guide

The awesome team at 4ormat has put together a PDF guide for Toronto newbies who are here to make, design, or shoot (aka creative and nerdy types).  Of course, I can think of more stuff that isn’t included, but overall, I think they’ve done a great job with the guide.

4ormat also makes an online magazine for the creative community called Explore Create Repeat. I subscribe by email, and look forward to a new article every Monday.

Super Cool Photos of Old and New Toronto

HarryEnchin

Toronto tech executive Harry Enchin has a cool hobby.  He takes old photos of Toronto (from the City’s archives) and recreates the photos, standing in the same spot in the city, in present day. Then he pulls both images into Photoshop and mixes parts of the old photo with the new. The results are sometimes poignant, sometimes witty (like the one above) and always interesting.

Read about the project here, and see many more images here.

[blog post idea and image above via Toronto Life]

The Urban Etiquette Project Made Me Laugh

UrbanEtiquetteProject

Graphic Designer Christopher Rouleau and the members of the Toronto Etiquette Project have introduced the Urban Etiquette Project – a series of printable notes that you can tick off and hand out, whenever you feel some is acting inappropriately in public space (or, doing something great that should be commended). I certainly have had moments in the city when I would love to hand one of these out (especially on public transit).  It would take a lot of guts to actually go through with it though, don’t you think?

PS – You Park Like an Asshole.

Drake General Store Pop-Up Shop at The Bay

drakepopup

Last week Ian and I had to meet our insurance agent downtown (thrilling, I know), so we decided to do some shopping while we were in the area.  I remembered reading that there was a Drake General Store pop-up shop in the lower level of The Bay on Queen Street, so we had a look.  It’s fantastic, and fairly big, considering it’s kind of temporary (the retail clerk told me they’d be there through the summer, but then who knows). After debating with Ian about whether it was cool (good) or too hip (bad), I decided to go for it and picked up a Toronto Public Library t-shirt, and a funny book.  I also pointed out this iPhone alarm clock to Ian, as a note for future birthday present ideas.  It’s the same one I blogged about over a year ago, and I still like it.

[photo of the Drake General Store pop-up shop via Toronto Shopaholic Blog]

There’s a Magical Fairy House in Cabbagetown

FairyTreehouse

Things like this make me smile.  Bunch Family (my fave parenting website) reported this morning that fairies have moved into a tree stump in Wellesley Park (in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood).  Click through to the post on Bunch for more pictures and info on what’s known about these magical fairies.

[photo by Meri Perra, c/o Bunch]