On Sunday, August 20th, 2017, Bring Your Thing hosted our most popular event to date, with over one hundred individuals coming to check out our booth at the Memorial Centre Farmers’ Market. For those who missed out on this great opportunity, the theme was Homegrown. We encouraged everyone in the community, and all the vendors at the farmer’s market, to bring objects that they thought related to the theme. I’ll say it proudly, the people did not disappoint! A lot of the items brought in fit perfectly with our theme and allowed us to display several artifacts that highlight Kingston’s agricultural and manufacturing history.
One item in particular that I enjoyed was the various bee keeping items brought in by Walter of Bee Happy Honey, who had a booth close to ours. Not only did they bring in a functional bee keeping suit, with the proper head gear, they also brought in a bee smoker. The smoker came with an interesting lesson about how it works. Contrary to what many of us are taught, the smoke does not calm the bees down. The smoke makes the bees think their hive is on fire, causing the bees to stock up on honey so that they can set up a new home as needed. When the bees are full on honey they become tired and sluggish, much like any of us after a big turkey dinner. We have Bee Happy Honey to thank for this lovely information, as well as some great objects.
There were many other items that were worth of our attention. You can see some of them pictured above. We had an old fashioned meat grinder, whose name gives away its purpose. We also had an old fashioned post hole digger, who’s name like the meat grinder, is all the explanation it needs. Along with these interesting tools brought by vendors and members of the community, the Marine Museum, The Museum of Health Care, and The Frontenac County Schools Museum had some great artifacts on display.
The artifacts were and are of the utmost importance to the Bring Your Thing event(s), however at this particular one it may have been upstaged by the two activities available. One activity was a game where participants were asked to match up pictures of root vegetables to pictures of their corresponding leaves.
The second activity, was a vegetable town. One of our talented volunteers drew a map of the area surrounding the memorial centre. The map was placed on a table where children and adults were free to decorate with various vegetable critters. Some designs we had were cars, dogs, people, unicorns and my favourite, a dragon!
Overall this event was a huge success and our next event “Capture Kingston” was held at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning on September 14th,, 2017. Learn More Here.
