Bonjour,

First of all, you may notice I've changed the layout of my blog slightly: it's wider than it used to be so I can make the pictures bigger. This seemingly small change actually involved a great deal of fiddling about in Paint to get my banner to the right width, but hopefully it was worth it.

Today I was fiddling about aimlessly in the Polyvore set creator, and I decided to put together a bunch of outfits in a new series of posts for my blog: I plan to take a different fictional or historical character each time and create some outfits for them that I imagine they would wear in the novel or historical episode I associate them with. This combines my love of fashion and literature/history so perfectly, I can't believe why I haven't thought of it before now!

For the first instalment I chose Catherine Howard, also known as the 5th wife of Henry VIII who was executed for treason after little more than a year of marriage. I find the whole story of her early life and downfall absolutely fascinating, which is why about 80% of my collection of Tudor historical fiction is about her in some way - it's so interesting to read different portrayals of her, and build up a many-layered image of what she was really like. She apparently loved clothes and swore never to wear the same garment twice! Obviously all the outfits I came up with are modern takes, as otherwise this would really be quite boring.