TAGG (The Artsy Girls Guild)

Sketch of TAGG logo by Pam Goffinet

You know how much I love my art girlfriends. It's been a tough winter and I haven't seen any of them since December. So when we got together for our regular monthly meeting last night it was a warm reunion.

From left to right in this photo are Jay, me, Susan, Dee, Pam, Annie & Lorraine. Although our waitress did her best she only managed to get 7 out of the 10 of us in this shot.

We debated on where to meet last night. Susan had proposed Aruba and if he could have swung it I'm sure we'd have all met there. So the warmest sounding place we could come up with was a Mexican restaurant in Newark, Delaware called Santa Fe. It was a new experience for all of us.

In this photo are Pam and Lynn.

Newark is the home of the University of Delaware and I think we were the only patrons in the restaurant over the age of 25 and the place was packed. I thought the hostess was going to walk off the job when I arrived 20 minutes ahead of our meeting time and told her I needed a table for 9 and we didn't have a reservation. Fortunately, at 5 minutes to 6:00 a large table of young ladies at the front of the restaurant cleared out just in time for our group to be seated and we ended up being 10.

And this is a photo of Judy and Jay.

The food was good and our waitress very attentive. But it was noisy and a little dark, but we made the best of things and had a great time.

This is Annie and her friend, Bernie, who was visiting from Ireland. We always love visitors to our meetings. One of our favorite parts of our meetings is Show & Tell. Whenever someone has created something new, they bring it to share with the others.

Pam, who is a fiber artist, has 26 pieces in a show in Oxford, Pennsylvania which opens tonight. Her item for Show & Tell was this postcard announcing the show and featuring one of her works; the woven map of Australia on the left.



Lorraine, who is an accomplished oil painter, has lately been woodburning dried gourds to great effect and has been selling her gourd designs through a company known as Meadowbrooke Gourds and she was even featured in one of their recent catalogs.

These are absolutely magnificent and I loved how the lids fit so nicely onto the base of the gourds. Here is a link to the website: Meadowbrooke Gourds

Jay is a jewelry designer and brought a number of her pieces to show us. We drooled over them.





Because the lighting in the restaurant was so dim, someone in the group volunteered a small flashlight, which was passed around with the Show & Tell items so that we could see them better. Here Annie is holding the flashlight in her right hand to illuminate Jay's necklaces.

Susan is the ceramic artist in the group. She has been miserable with the wretched weather we've experienced this winter and she vowed to only make pieces of art which would make her laugh. She brought two of those pieces to share with us.

This whimsical bird in its nest is part of a continuing series of birds that Susan calls raku-ku's. (I hope I'm spelling that right.) Anyone familiar with raku will appreciate the pun.

And lastly is a creature which sprung up as an offshoot of Susan's mermaid series. She calls it, naturally enough, a catfish.

It was a wonderful evening and I'm pretty sure a good time was had by all. When we stepped out into the night air after dinner, it actually felt almost balmy. I'm sure it's just because we all felt warm inside from being able to be together again. I miss these gals already and can't wait until next month!