Dye-it

I was feeling well enough on Saturday night to attempt another dyeing project. I bought a pair of bright pink corduroys back in college, when they were on crazy-sale at J.Crew, but I've hardly ever worn them. They were really garish and didn't go with much, although they fit perfectly. I'd been trying to figure out what to do with them for a while: Give them away? Try to bleach them white? Make a bag out of them?

I finally hit on the idea of dyeing them when I found myself considering a pair of purple cords I found online a couple of weeks ago. I realized that my pink pants + blue dye could give me a custom color in just the shade of dark eggplant I was hoping for.

I wanted a much more saturated color than last time, so I decided to use the stovetop method and double the amount of dye I used. I also used liquid RIT this time, instead of the powder, because undissolved powder (which is very difficult to see in the inky solution) can lead to speckling.

Here's the before shot, when I pre-soaked the pants in hot water. They were BRIGHT.

The dyeing process was simple, but not easy. You bring a huge pot of water (RIT recommends 3 gallons per pound of fabric) to a simmer on the stove, then add the dye, a cup of salt, and the pre-soaked fabric. Then comes the endless, mindless part: 30 minutes of stirring. For half an hour, you have to stand by the stove, constantly agitating the fabric to make sure that it all gets evenly dyed.

The next step is the trickiest: you need to move the fabric between progressively cooler water baths until it stops bleeding color. This is the part where I wish I had a big yard and a hose, because there's great potential for mess-making and countertop-staining, and lot of running to the bathroom for fresh buckets of water. The first few moves are the hardest, when the dye is still pretty strong and the fabric is full of 140-degree water, so you have to quickly move a heavy, steaming, sopping heap of dye-soaked fabric from container to container while your assistant (thanks, Stephen!) dumps the full buckets and refills them with slightly cooler water. It's a water-intensive process. I went through at least a dozen water changes before the water was (mostly) clear. Then I hung the pants up to dry.

Here they are the next day. It's hard to tell what they'll look like when you're in the midst of the dyeing process, because they always dry a few shades lighter, but these are exactly the color I was hoping for.

Sickbed

On Friday, I finally caught some version of the Late Winter Cold that I'd heretofore avoided, despite weeks of exposure to sick co-workers, family and boyfriend. It hasn't been too bad, just a sore throat and a cough so far, but I headed into the weekend with a single purpose: to be really sick and lazy for two days, then return, a least partially recovered, to work on Monday. I armed myself with:

1. 11 hours of sleep each night
2. Moyashi soba at Wagamama
3. Black currant juice (for Vitamin C)
4. Meyer lemon and honey (my mom always makes this for a sore throat)
5. Blueberry tea
6. Homemade masala chai (I like to make it with Lyle's)
7. Pizza
8. Pseudoephedrine-free faux Nyquil

So far, I've definitely succeeded at the being-really-sick-and-lazy part, but we'll have to see about the returning-to-work-recovered bit. I have my doubts.

Rest Day

Ow. I'm so achey. I've been hobbling around all day, groaning about my overworked muscles. I accidentally got to the gym an hour early for trampoline class (that's right, trampoline class) yesterday, so I decided to go to the 6:00 weight-lifting class, too. It hurt. And there was a guy from ABC News filming us for a story as we flailed around with our Smartbells, so I had to work extra hard to keep the immense effort/panic from showing on my face.

I packed my gym clothes again today, but decided at the last minute to scrap the workout and go out to dinner with Stephen instead. A light snow was falling, and our waiter remarked on the beauty of the snow as it fell past the streetlights outside. I think we're all a little sick of winter, but it was beautiful. Eighteen days until Daylight Savings Time begins!

Hope Springs Eternal

Spring has come to our windowsill. These are Morning Glories from a packet of seeds that my sister collected from her garden and sent me a couple of years ago. I came across them while sorting through the living room closet last week and figured they were probably long-dead, but I soaked them overnight and threw them in some soil just to see what would happen. We found an onion left over from last fall's farm share growing in the cupboard, too, so I put that in the same pot.

And lo! just a few days later, we've got a very crowded little Garden of Oddities sprouting in the kitchen. I guess I should have spaced the seeds out a bit more. It's really the wrong time of year to be growing them, and I don't have the heart to thin them, so perhaps the outlook is grim for our seedling friends. But take heart, Morning Glories. I'll string some twine from the curtain rod and see if we get some climbers.

Here's our second early spring miracle. It's a paperwhite narcissus, my birthflower. My parents used to give me a bunch of them every year on my birthday. I've been trying to grow them in my apartment for a few years now, but I keep getting bad bulbs. (Either that, or I'm doing something wrong, but there's not much--that I'm aware of--to go wrong here: Put the bulbs in a dish with rocks, allowing just the very bottom to rest in water. Wait for bulbs to grow.) For the last two years, I haven't even been able to coax them to put roots out. I bought four more bulbs in early January, but after 3 weeks nothing had happened. Finally, one of them (this one) put out the tiniest nib of a root. I threw the rest out and left this one on the windowsill as an experiment. Now I'm so glad I did! It's got a robust tangle of roots and some substantial stems that seem to grow an inch a day. I'm hoping for some flowers later in the month.

It's Getting Hot in Here

50 degrees today! Snow's melting, birds are singing, and the radiators have finally cooled off. We've been out and about more than usual this weekend. We went to IKEA yesterday for some little things--a frame for a poster I got Stephen for Christmas, some fabric for imaginary future projects, random things for the kitchen. The cafe was abuzz with greater-Bostonians of all ages eating chocolate cake and drinking Kristian Regale. I actually don't mind the IKEA cafeteria. It's a lot nicer than most mass retailers' in-house eateries. (I'm looking at you, Poughkeepsie Galleria Food Court of My Youth.)

I'm trying to catch up on school work today, because there's a lot due later in the week. This would have been totally unheard-of when I was an undergrad, when my M.O. was starting papers at 11:30 the night before they were due. I still do that sometimes, but I'm trying to be a little more organized about things this time around.

Of course, the first step to getting any schoolwork done is to clear a space in which to do it. Although I grew up surrounded by clutter (the fight against The Mess was an ongoing, and often losing, battle for our family of four kids and two full-time working parents), I have a lot of trouble concentrating in a messy room. My brain can't work when my fingers are itching to arrange, rearrange, and (most of all) to throw things out. One of my greatest joys after an afternoon of cleaning is taking a huge pile of old papers out to the recycling bin.

Just look at this picture of my desk this morning, and compare it to my workspace a week ago. I don't know how I got anything done back then.

From the Desk Of

One of my New Year's resolutions was to spend more time at home on the weekends. During the week, I almost never see the apartment during daylight hours, except for a small sliver of time between waking up and rushing out the door. I spend most evenings at class, at the gym, and/or working late at the office, so it's unusual that I'm home before 8pm.

To date, I have succeeded far better than I could ever have imagined. I've barely left the apartment over the past three weekends, and then only for short errands. I'm working on several school projects and doing a ton of editing these days, so most Saturday and Sunday hours are spent here, at my desk, typing and gazing out the window. When I'm not at the computer, I'm usually reading, trying to keep pace with the Book Club of One, or knitting while working my way through the Netflix queue.

I'm still cleaning, too. I did a deep clean of the living room closet and the bureau in the kitchen today, tossed a lot of old stuff, and finally put the Christmas tree away. Found about a dozen half-finished projects that had been stuffed in there during previous organizing frenzies: the corduroy blazer that Stephen started sewing in 2007, a half-finished hand quilting project, some embroidery still in its hoop, a sundress that I have been planning to finish for each of the past 2 summers, and a 95% complete afghan that I gave up on last winter when I decided it was too ugly to finish. It's a little overwhelming.

It's nice to be at home, though. I know we'll move out of this apartment eventually, and I want to be able to remember what it was like to be here, not just to pass through at the end of the day to actually live in the space.

That said, I think it's time I started spending a little more weekend time in the outside world. I really want to go into the city, see the Shepard Fairey survey when it opens at the ICA, maybe go to the aquarium. The icy sidewalks have thus far dissuaded me from venturing out, though. I felt the first pang of I'm-ready-for-spring yesterday while watching, of all things, a Vampire Weekend video on YouTube. I'm not sure where it was filmed, but the setting is so evocative of rural New York in the early spring, just after the snow has melted but before anything has bloomed, that I could almost feel the warm breeze in my lungs as I watched it. Oh, spring. How many weeks of snow do we have left? Eight?

What's Cooking:

Ah, January. Once I've emerged from the underwater-time of the holidays (quiet, calm, snowbound; everyday concerns far-off and muffled), the first thing I like to do to reorient myself is clean like a madwoman. The second is re-set my schedule. (No more going to bed at 1, 2, 3am. 11:30 is the new bedtime!) Yes, I become quite a strict disciplinarian after three heady weeks of presents, cake, hot chocolate and lollygagging.

The third thing I like to do in January is get in the newly-clean kitchen and start baking, especially things with citrus zest. Maybe it's Vitamin C deficiency, or a hankering for warmer climes, or the seasonality of the fruit, but all I want to eat these days is citrus. When I bit into an orange at work last week, it was like the malt syrup factory scene in Slaughterhouse Five*. I don't even usually like oranges. In the past few days, I've also had salmon with citrus salsa, sole with lemon-caper glaze, salad with lemon vinaigrette, and lemon madeleines with (surprise!) lemon glaze. Can't get enough.

I'm also thinking about making cheese. My sister gave me a mozzarella kit for my birthday, and it looks pretty easy. Stephen's making French bread this afternoon, and we cracked out some of last summer's saft yesterday. It's a non-stop homemade food frenzy around here.

We got several new cookbooks for Christmas. In fact, we got lots of every kind of book. We had to clear off an entire shelf in the living room to make space for them all. I've got a ton of new titles to add to the line-up for the Book Club of One. I'm starting with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, an electric book to go along with all of this acidic food.

I've been thinking about the twelve books I read last year, deciding which I'd recommend to myself if I were t0 start over again. I liked them all--I usually don't finish a book if I think it's a waste of time--but a few in particular really meant a lot to me. Mountains Beyond Mountains was the most powerful, followed by And the Band Played On. They made me glad that I'm learning to do health-related work. Of the novels, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was my favorite. I didn't expect it to be, but I think I read it at the right time, when the news was full of talk about recession, unemployment, and doing more with less: so many of the challenges that Francie's family faces. Somehow, it felt three-dimensional, like a book that I could get into and move around in. I didn't hold it at arm's-length. I hope I'll be able to find books as good this year.

* Speaking of good books:

Another true thing that Billy saw while he was unconscious in Vermont was the work that he and the others had to do in Dresden during the month before the city was destroyed. They washed windows and swept floors and cleaned lavatories and put jars in boxes and sealed cardboard boxes in a factory that made malt syrup. The syrup was enriched with vitamins and minerals. The syrup was for pregnant women.

The syrup tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke, and everybody who worked in the factory secretly spooned it all day long. They weren't pregnant, but they needed vitamins and minerals, too. Billy didn't spoon syrup on his first day at work, but lots of other Americans did.

Billy spooned it on his second day. There were spoons hidden all over the factory, on rafters, in drawers, behind radiators, and so on. They had been hidden in haste by persons who had been spooning syrup, who had heard somebody else coming. Spooning was a crime.

On his second day, Billy was cleaning behind a radiator and he found a spoon. To his back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other person who could see Billy and his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who was washing a window outside. The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy thrust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth.

A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.

There were diffident raps at the factory window. Derby was out there, having seen all. He wanted some syrup, too.

So Billy made a lollipop for him. He opened the window. He stuck the lollipop into poor old Derby's gaping mouth. A moment passed, and then Derby burst into tears. Billy closed the window and hid the sticky spoon. Somebody was coming.