ROD Toronto May Meeting

Got together yesterday with my friends Diane and Lorraine, whom I first met online when we were all taking Mary Ann Moss' "Remains of the Day" class.  I noticed their Toronto based messages on the Yahoo group, emailed them and suggested we meet up and we've been doing so on a regular basis for a while now.  It's great to have people you can hang out with and talk about the things you enjoy creating, how to's, where to get stuff, who's doing what, etc.  It keeps you motivated and it provides a constant source of inspiration and information.

It was a grey and foggy day yesterday, although the temperature was quite pleasant.  Here's what the view looked like as I drove into the city:

We started off yesterday at an art store downtown that I had never been to before, called Aboveground Art Supplies, on McCaul between Dundas and Queen. 

It's located right next door to the Ontario College of Art & Design (fondly known as OCAD)(check out the funky exterior of their building in the photo below) but I hadn't even heard of it until two weeks ago at Art & Soul when I met a couple of other ladies from Toronto who told me about it.

The store is crammed full of art supplies of every sort, inside an older building that clearly used to be a semi-detached house, with two staircases on either side of one wall and small rooms leading in and out of each other.  I picked up some 22x30 inch sheets of Fabriano Artistico 140 lb. watercolour paper to take on my trip to Portugal next month with Teesha and Tracy Moore, as well as a few other treats.

As Diane was possibly about to receive a phone call to say her daughter was in labour, we decided to grab some lunch next and walked a few blocks to Baldwin Street, which is filled with a collection of funky stores and restaurants (and poetry on telephone poles).

On our way to lunch, we stopped off at each of our cars to do a quick show and tell of various goodies we had brought to show one another.  Our get-togethers always involve show and tell, as we are each always in the midst of taking a class, creating a new journal, just back from a trip, etc. and there are always goodies to show and share.  Usually we spread out in someone's home or across a restaurant table but since we weren't sure how much time we would have and whether or not it was about to rain, this was the first time we did it in our vehicles!

Along the way, we passed this guy, who was offering his paintings for sale while dressed for wet weather in a red rubber coat and matching boots:

Here's where we ate, delicious eggplant and goat cheese paninis on calabrese bread:

After lunch, we paid a visit to Curry's (another art store) and picked up a few more bits and pieces (better prices on Copic markers, in case you were wondering).  Diane headed home (no phone call, so no new baby just yet) and Lorraine and I headed off to The Paper Place on Queen Street West to check out their selection of decorative tapes (sorry for the fuzzy photo, must have been the excitement of seeing this many tapes all in one spot):

I couldn't resist picking up a few, including these ones with the Paris theme:

Rain, traffic congestion, closed roads and detours all combined to make my drive home slow and somewhat frustrating but other than that, it was a great day out with my fellow craft monkeys.  Looking forward to our next get-together and in the meantime, I'll be getting busy with my new art supplies.  Thanks for a lovely day, ladies!