About a year ago, Charlotte Sometimes disappeared from the internet.

There was, in fact, a fairly dramatic reason for that: the site had become infected with a virus.

By that point, though, the blog had also become a bit bitty. It had been around for years, my interests had wandered in all sorts of directions, and there wasn’t really much holding it all together. Faced with the prospect of cleaning up a compromised website that I wasn’t entirely happy with anyway, I took the whole thing down.

I kept thinking about bringing it back.

So, here we are.

Charlotte Sometimes is back, although probably not quite as it was before.

What is Charlotte Sometimes about now?

The short answer is: things I find interesting.

The slightly more useful answer is costume, history, sewing, craft, material culture, LARP, reenactment, gardens, and the various rabbit holes that connect all of those things together.

I have never been particularly good at having hobbies that remain simple hobbies.

It is rarely enough for me to decide that I would like to make a piece of clothing. I want to know how the original garment was constructed, what it might have been made from, who would have worn it, what evidence survives, whether the modern pattern everyone uses is actually based on anything, and why somebody in a manuscript appears to have done something completely different.

Then, eventually, I might actually sew it.

This is the sort of thing Charlotte Sometimes is going to be about.

History, but with things in it

I am particularly interested in the ordinary, physical bits of history.

Clothes. Baskets. Textiles. Tools. Gardens. Household objects. The things people made, repaired, carried around, wore until they wore out, and probably didn’t consider remotely interesting at the time.

Material culture is one of the places where history becomes wonderfully specific.

It is one thing to know broadly how somebody in the thirteenth century lived. It is another to find yourself wondering what shape of basket she would have carried to market, how it was constructed, and whether the nice one you’ve found for sale actually looks anything like the baskets in contemporary images.

I enjoy that sort of problem far more than is probably reasonable.

There will be research here, but I don’t want Charlotte Sometimes to become somewhere that simply repeats historical facts. I’m interested in what happens when you actually make things, wear them, grow them, repair them, and use them.

Sometimes historical techniques make immediate sense once you try them. Sometimes they absolutely do not. Both are interesting.

Costume, sewing, and making things for imaginary people

There will be a lot of sewing.

Some of it will be historical costume, and some historically inspired. Some will be experimental. Some will be meticulously researched. Some will begin with historical evidence and wander cheerfully off into fantasy.

I make costume for LARP, particularly Empire, and I am fascinated by the point where historical clothing and fantasy costume meet.

I think there is something much more interesting about starting with the shape, construction, materials, and visual language of real clothing, and then deciding where to depart from it. Fantasy does not have to mean attaching another belt to something.

Although I reserve the right to attach unnecessary belts where appropriate.

I’ll be writing about garments I’m making, fabrics and materials, embroidery, construction techniques, repairs, costume design, and the research behind various projects.

There will almost certainly be quite a lot about medieval clothing.

I make no apology for this.

LARP and reenactment

LARP will have a home here too.

Not really the game mechanics side of it, but the material side: costume, props, camp equipment, banners, practical kit, visual worldbuilding, and all the tiny details that make an imaginary world feel as though somebody might actually live in it.

I’m also becoming increasingly interested in reenactment and living history, particularly the bits concerned with everyday life rather than combat.

That overlaps rather neatly with another longstanding fascination of mine: experimental archaeology.

There is a particular kind of knowledge that only appears when somebody actually tries the thing.

How awkward is that garment to work in? How much can that basket carry? How quickly does something wear out? Does this method of construction make more sense once you’ve used the finished object?

These aren’t always questions that can be answered by looking at something behind glass.

I suspect there will be quite a lot of trying things.

And then there’s the garden

The garden might initially seem like the odd one out.

It isn’t, really.

I grow things because I like gardening, obviously, but I am also increasingly interested in useful plants and in producing a little more for myself.

Plants for dyeing. Plants for herbs. Plants that have a history. Things that can be eaten, dried, preserved, woven, brewed, cut, coppiced, or turned into something else.

This is how you end up growing madder for several years because eventually you might want some red dye.

Apparently I consider this perfectly normal behaviour.

There will also be a bit of self-sufficiency and practical preparedness here. Nothing terribly apocalyptic, but I am interested in growing food, preserving it, keeping useful things to hand, reducing waste, learning practical skills, and generally making the household a little more resilient.

I like knowing that I can make, mend, grow, preserve, or improvise something when I need to.

So there will be ordinary gardening here, but also natural dyes, useful plants, historical gardens, edible growing, preserving, growing materials for craft, and assorted experiments in seeing how much I can produce from a relatively small patch of ground.

Some of them may even work.

Mostly, though, this is a blog again

I don’t want Charlotte Sometimes to become a perfectly curated collection of definitive guides written solely because somebody might type the right combination of words into Google.

I miss blogs.

I miss people having slightly peculiar corners of the internet where they documented things they were interested in. I miss following projects as they developed, reading about experiments that didn’t quite work, and finding a post about something so absurdly specific that you couldn’t believe somebody else had wondered about it too.

I’d like Charlotte Sometimes to be one of those places.

There will be properly researched articles and useful guides, but there will also be projects, experiments, works in progress, things I’ve discovered, things I’ve changed my mind about, and probably occasional dispatches from particularly deep research rabbit holes.

I’m not promising a rigid publishing schedule, and I’m not going to pretend all of these subjects fit neatly into separate boxes. They absolutely don’t.

Costume leads to textile history. Textile history leads to natural dyes. Natural dyes lead to the garden. The garden leads to food preservation and self-sufficiency. LARP leads to historical clothing. Historical clothing leads to material culture. Material culture leads to an inexplicably detailed investigation into medieval baskets.

And suddenly it’s three hours later.

Welcome back to Charlotte Sometimes.