We just give envelopes with money because it is too tiresome to have to think up something you want that someone else can shop for. I'm far too finicky to have anyone else shop for me.
Like Jim I'm keen on music, but it's years since I've actually played any vinyl; I use CDs instead, of which I reduced my collection to about 6000 discs or sets when I stopped reviewing music. This year I ordered a complete set of the Bach Cantata by Ton Koopman.
I thought it might be a good idea to make bicycle outings to the many beauty spots around here to make a quick pen and wash sketch. So I ordered a Winsor & Newton Field Box (a pocket size watercolour kit), some small books of watercolour paper (90x140mm, A6 and A5, various pocket sizes in portrait and landscape), and a Chinese calligraphy fountain pen (it mimics a brush for writing Mandarin ideographs) because I don't have the patience for dip pens, several types of Japanese fude fountain pen brushes (normally used for writing Kanji) because they have a very expressive line, also a Koh-i-noor 5.6mm clutch pencil and a variety of Cretacolor leads (sanguine chalks, charcoal, black pastel, nero oil, white chalk, graphite range, etc) for it for more traditional drawing, and the necessary tools including a set of water brushes. In the long ago and far away I was briefly a painter, good enough to mount one-man sell-out exhibitions in London and New York.
(http://coolmainpress.com//miscimage/two_palettes_by_andre_jute.jpg)
The Winsor & Newton Field Box is the blue apparat with the white wings, which are mixing surfaces. The little blue bucket lying above it to the left of the pencil tin also attaches to the assembly to wash brushes, and the travelling brush is the chrome stick beside the water bottle. The whole thing is tiny, only a couple of inches long. In the pencil tin are some of the paints that came in the Field Box that I rejected; they belong to a so-called "split palette" which is a bodge on the back of another bodge believed by people who don't know anything about how colour is created or perceived, who cannot distinguish psychosomatics from physics, or either from wishful thinking. Instead I made up two palettes, a spring one and an autumn one, which are the two seasons here, between what came in the field box and what was in my late father-in-law's excellent cigar box kit for painting in places where the sun never set on the Raj, which unfortunately appeared from my wife's trunks only after I already ordered the W&N Field Box; her father, a thoughtful, thorough man, had an excellent eye and taste, so I just updated his choices with more modern, lightfast pigments where available; in all I had to buy only three extra tubes of paint (not seen; they're in the small blue W&N box in the pencil tin), which I used to fill the half pans. The second palette is in the Altoids tin, and the remnants (poisonous and fugitive Chrome Yellow, a Winsor & Newton Purple Lake I can't find any record of anywhere and therefore must assume is fugitive) of my father-in-law's cigar box field kit is also in the photo. The basic palette in both cases is Cyan, Magenta, Yellow as the primaries, which can already mix a very wide gamut, plus all the secondaries, plus from the tertiaries violet (without which there is a dent in the gamut you can mix with my CMY model), plus a tertiary convenience green to save time (Hooker's Deep) plus in each case a tertiary pyrolle red (Winsor Red) because I like the way it blazes. Note that both palettes have a good strong red-orange. The rest of the halfpans are earth colours and a convenience neutral, in one case Payne's Grey, in the other Ivory Black. One palette is transparent and luminous, one opaque and granulating with the possibility of being slightly dulled if required, or glowing warmly where that is wanted, to suit the seasons here.
Those of you with reprographics experience will grasp immediately what I'm doing here.
Andre Jute