About the Site

After maintaining Shards of Narsil Costumes on free servers for years, Katie finally invested in her own webspace in 2008. Shards has been around in some incarnation or another since approximately 2002; its newest format is as a portfolio and personal site for the works of Katie Jacobs.

The site itself is designed with CSS and HTML, hand-coded in Notepad. It looks best when viewed in Mozilla Firefox 2-point-something or higher. If you insist upon using Internet Explorer, you may miss some of the finer design points as certain elements of the stylesheet insist upon going wonky between browsers. All layout images were created with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0. Color design choices by Gwendolyn Basala.

About the Girl

Photo by Sarah Jones

In the past couple of years since graduating college (2007), Katie has spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what "being an adult," actually means. Some days go better than others, but so far she's discovered working a nine-to-five desk job is the easy part. Slightly more difficult is keeping up with things like grocery shopping, apartment cleaning, taking out the garbage yourself, and paying bills on time. At her day job, Katie is a case manager at an agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that helps people pursue employment and education. There, she processes more paperwork than she previously knew existed, and talks to people as much as possible. Sometimes, she even gets to do it in Spanish, which is good because it keeps her from feeling like getting a Bachelors of Arts in Spanish wasn't a complete waste of time.

Then, of course, there's her hobby: historical reenacting. What started as a wistful fascination with pretty movie costumes and a casual interest in historical dance quickly became a full-blown way of life. Soon, her coworkers learned better than to ask her out after work when an event was coming up, because frantically finishing chemises and dress hems definitely took priority over happy hour. Add to this a fantastic group of friends and family that fully supports, encourages, and enables reenacting as a lifestyle, and Theatrical~Historical is what you get.

Now if only should could get herself to the grocery store on a regular basis, then we might actually be getting somewhere...