This was my very first blog, and now I (omigawd) actually earn a rather comfortable living teaching other people how to blog and do other nefarious things online, which blows me away every time I think about it.

The time seemed right to finally throw off the shackles of the pseudonym I adopted all those years ago, make this thing pretty and fit for public consumption, and make an honest blog out of it.

Yes, I cleaned up one or two posts before attaching my name to it.

No, I didn’t delete that story you liked. It was semi-porntastic, yes, but I just couldn’t part with it. (You’re welcome.)

So please join me over there on the sunny side of the internet, won’t you?

This blog now lives at www.anaccomplishedyounglady.com.

Melissa and I are still neck-deep in our Jane Eyre obsession (for me it is a rekindled passion, for Melissa it is new and FRESH) and we are moved by purely altrustic purposes to invite you to share our joy.

Join us in an unabashed and self-indulgent Bronte-Along, as we swoon in unison over Mr. Rochester’s bigamist charms.

In Melissa’s own words:

Required: Watch the 2006 Masterpiece Theatre film version of Jane Eyre

Encouraged: Read the book by Charlotte Bronte

As if you could help it: SWOON

Hoped for and encouraged: blog, tweet facebook about it if you are into it. Basically, I just want others to swoon with )

Would be awesome: Craft, paint, visual journal, etc about it! I have been so inspired to paint the characters and research the dress of the times etc, that you might be similarly swept up. If so, I would love to see your work!

Anything else? Suggestions welcome! I will compile a complete list of interested parties so we can visit everyone’s blogs and see what everyone is up to! And suggestions for requirements or encouragements will be added to an official post stating it all. I mean an unofficial post. Yeah.

The bottom line is that I am just so utterly in love with the story that I want others to share it with!

xo,

melissa

It is my secret hope that we can expand the theme, make it a true tour of the glories of the Sisters Bronte, and move on from Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, to enjoy Heathcliff’s sullen and vengeful brooding… and perhaps end the trip in a prolonged visit to Wildfell Hall to complete the cycle.

For although I love Jane Austen dearly, I often feel like the Bronte sisters get the short end of the stick. All this Darcying about and Colonel-Brandoning it up is quite well and good, but sometimes a girl just wants some dark and brooding moorland action to soothe her soul.

Am I wrong?

Of course I am not.

Join us.

You cannot resist. Confess it.

I have unleashed the mighty power of the SCREENCAP:

I thought you might like to know.

Naturally, I spent a great portion of the winter this year embroiled in a deep obsession with the PBS/BBC series Cranford.  Partly because I will watch ALMOST any British period costume drama they care to serve up (I draw the line firmly at Keira Knightly), and partly because the cast was so wonderful.

I will watch anything, for example, with this divine lady in it:

Love. Her.

So Cranford was sweet and light and fun — it didn’t feature a great quantity of the smouldering and agonizing heartache that I prize so much in period drama, but it DID feature some truly glorious knitting that I spent much of the winter trying to recreate.

Mostly, I was obsessed with the many varieties of fingerless gloves (which they would have called mittens) that the ladies of Cranford wore.

I ordered a great big cone of natural, somewhat rough, handspun lace-weight yarn so that I could experiment at will, and while I was waiting for it to arrive (annoyingly, it was backordered for weeks — I suspect I wasn’t the only obsessive knitter so afflicted) I pulled out some gorgeous malabrigo laceweight that I had had in my stash for over two years, patiently waiting for a project that was worthy of it.

After starting and stopping a few times with various combinations of stitches, I decided that I first wanted to see how the yarn would behave in a lacey mitt pattern, so I made a pair in the Spyrogyra pattern from Knitty.com that I had always loved, and gave them to my friend Melissa, who has the tiniest, most delicate paws you can possibly imagine.

Here’s how they came out (beautiful photography by Melissa Averinos, natch):

See what I mean? How could you not want to knit for delicate little hands like that? I ask you.

So those came out pretty well, but my cone of handspun, oatmeal-colored yarn still hadn’t arrived, so I started up another pair, this one a Cranford-inspired pattern of my own devising, destined for my very own hands.

These had a short cuff of two-by-two ribbing, followed by a simple double-yarn-over lacey loop repeat, followed by very basic stockinette all the way up to a running diagonal lace trim on the fingers and thumb. I wanted to show off the gorgeous shades of the hand-dyed malabrigo yarn more than the Spyrogyra pattern had done, so I suffered in silence through the many hours of laceweight stockinette on size zero needles. The horror!

It was fun. I secretly LOVE knitting on teeny tiny needles.

So those cameout quite satisfactorily, too, and I now wear them every day at work in my freezing office in Cambridge:

And when THOSE were done, I finally had possession of my cone of oatmeal two-ply. But by then I was so mittened out that I jumped right into a huge circular shawl with a deliciously soft brown trim with the stuff.

It isn’t quite finished yet (almost! dang but that trim takes forEVER to finish up), nevermind blocked to within an inch of its life, but here is a taste:

I should be able to complete the trim and block it out next weekend, which is just about when I expect the crocuses to start to poke their little heads up out of the ground.

And then it will be time to move on from winter-ish knitting and into some springier sorts of crafty goodness.

I am thinking something soft and green, to celebrate the new season of warmth.

What will it be?

You may recall that I harbored a fine passion for the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre that was aired in the US on PBS in early 2007. Well, I showed that version to Melissa, and it grabbed her by the throat and shook her, hard, just like it did me a few years back.

So I have happily joined her in her throes of watching, rewatching, trolling YouTube for more to watch, of this delightful movie.

Do you remember when I planted all that heather in my front yard?

It was specifically so that I could, one day, have enough heather that I could imagine staggering across it in despair, having left Thornfield Hall after discovering Mr. Rochester’s bigamist designs.

What? That’s normal.

This is what that plot of heather looked like when I planted it:

Last summer, they achieved fully-grown status. (I don’t have any great, sweeping views of them, but I do have a few pretty close-ups from last July:)

Best of all, they are starting to naturalize all over the yard:

Isn’t it lovely to see so much green at this time of year, and remember that it is almost spring? Let’s look at some more of last year’s garden. It is making my heart so light:

You should not be surprised to learn that I am something of an untidy gardener. I generally don’t clear out spaces for neat little rows of annuals and perennials, preferring instead to scatter seeds and install adolescent plants where my intuition tells me they might thrive, and sometimes I get lucky and I’m right and they do.

Last summer I planted hundreds and thousands of wildflower seeds. It was a raging success.

This year I will be sowing lupines all over the joint. It is going to rock.

But the real reason I wanted to tell you all this is because it is finally beginning to feel ever so slightly like spring around here — not quite like it is spring, but like spring is not a mere fanciful notion that you and I made up after a carbohydrate binge, wishing we could do more than huddle under our many knitted woolen things and dream of Mr. Rochester for warmth.

This week on Cape Cod, it is slated to be warm (in the mid 40s, mind you!) and sunny. Even on the one or two days that it is slated to rain, it is going to be warm (47 degrees! a veritable summer shower!).

And I cannot help poking around in the garden, looking for the first signs of my newest addition (one hopes) to the yard’s bounty:

Last fall, I planted crocuses.

I made sure to choose the earliest bloomers of the breed, so that my salt-swept riverbank of a yard would have the best shot at some real, honest, early color.

I will keep you posted, my fiends.

Until then, I will stagger across my rough patch of heather, eagerly awaiting spring.