More art, and a lovely gift

At the department where I work, we are hosting some visiting prospective students this week, and yesterday one of them gave me a thank-you gift for a bit of extra advising I'd provided -- it's a beautiful little pouch on a very long cord, intended to hold eyeglasses.  Naturally, I immediately found an alternate use for it:

It holds my drawing implements perfectly (they actually do fit all the way inside), and the cord is so long that when I wear it over the shoulder, the pouch falls right at my hip.  It even has an extra zippered pouch on the side where I could put my reading glasses if I wanted.

It's perfect for lunch time work sketching -- I used to just toss the sketchbook, watercolor palette, and all the tools into my backpack, and then I'd have to keep digging around in it to find the tools.  Now I have a handy way to carry them separately, where they are easy to find.

I tested it out at lunch yesterday, on the back side of the UW Botany greenhouses:

The forecast today is for 60 and sunny.  I predict that more sketching will occur!