It’s that time of year again: the holidays done and dusted, and time to look back at what I accomplished this year, what I didn’t accomplish. 2016 was a weird year.  It was great on a career level (yay, I launched Scroop Patterns!).  And there were some personal/sew-y highlights (Costume College), but it was also a really horrible year on a personal level (things I don’t talk about here…). My goal is to make 2017 even better on a career level (so many Scroop Patterns!).  And I’m going to do everything I can to make it a much better year personally, though I don’t have as much control over that by far, and a lot of my personal  grief and heartache of 2016 will continue for a while. It’s also a year that came to an extremely frustrating end: my main working computer crashed catastrophically  on the 29th, while  I was backing it up: a disaster that appears to have taken both the hard drive, the backup it was doing, and the backup before that, …

There has been a bit of a brou-ha-ha in costuming and re-enacting circles over the last week over how to behaving in public while dressed up, and how much  we should expect from the public to accommodate our particular  needs due to our lifestyle choice. I don’t want to get involved in the specific drama that has triggered this, but I thought that a bit of a guideline of the things that I keep in mind, and the things that I warn models and friends dressing up with me to be aware of, when dressed in costumes of period attire, might be helpful. These are rules of  etiquette I stick to when  I’m out and about in costume or historical dress, whether it’s just having fun wearing a costume for a day, being in a public space for a photoshoot (formal or informal), stopping at the supermarket on my way home for a talk, or living as much as possible in the past  for the Fortnight in 1916. My goal is always to be as …