Portfolio | Bio

A Web Portfolio

• The Blackwork Embroidery Archives contains my collection of original embroidery designs based on historical sources. Some of these patterns were originally published in Elizabethan Blackwork (three volumes) and were used in the Schole of Needleworke at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. (This site won a 1997 "Best of the Net" award from The Mining Company.)

• Legends is my online journal of heroic tales in history, literature, folklore, fiction, and the arts. Here you'll find King Arthur, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood, and Blackbeard; ballads, fairy tales, and medieval romance; Howard Pyle and William Morris. Legends is one of Yahoo!'s "Cool Links".
• Renaissance: The Elizabethan World at Dueling Modems features the following sites:
  
  Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge, 1558-1603 is an online commonplace book for writers, actors, and re-enactors, writtem by Maggie Pierce Secara. I designed it for the web using period illustrations and calligraphic fonts.
  
  Elizabethan Heraldry is a collection of original essays, primary source documents, and John Neitz's Blazons of the Ancient Paternal Arms of the Peers of England, for which I rendered the arms in full color.
  
  I've been fascinated by heraldry's unique combination of graphic design, fossilized language, and arcane tradition for many years, and I have often thought of using the web to teach the principles of armory. The result is A Primer of Blazonry: A Visual Introduction to Heraldry.
• The Text & Typography Page features reviews and links to typographic and design resources.

A Brief Bio

About the name ... I'll answer to Paula, Kate, Katie, Paula Kate, or pk. All of those are in general use; pick one or collect 'em all!

I am a native Californian, and I live in a late 1930s house in a woodsy pocket of the San Fernando Valley.

By profession, I manage an interactive media development team in the entertainment industry; my prior experience was as a project manager and business systems analyst specializing in implementation of distributed and client-server systems. I have also designed, written, edited, and illustrated technical documentation. I have taught business writing and management skills.

By avocation, I am a designer: graphics, embroidery patterns, period costumes, interiors. I paid my graphic design dues using Formatt, Letraset, typewriters, and rubber cement, pasting up the monthly fantasy-fiction newsletter Fantasiae for several years. I am interested in the history of textiles and of clothing, as well as costume for films and the theater. I have made Elizabethan and Victorian costumes, but these days my sewing is mostly confined to remodeling vintage tweed sportcoats.

I was the founding editor of the journal Parma Eldalamberon, an early source for the study of the invented languages in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Parma is still in publication under the editorial direction of Christopher Gilson; much new material is now available for the study of Tolkien's languages.

Other topics which interest me include film, medieval and renaissance history, folk- and calendar-customs of the English-speaking world, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts movement, costumes and corsetry, typography, calligraphy, copyediting, grammar, philology, book design and illustration, historical novels, border ballads, rock-and-reel, computers, theories of project management, the evolution of the English language, gardening, urban forestry, and backyard birding.

You can occassionally find me in my electronic salon on Dueling Modems, where I was web-designer-in-residence 1997-1999.

For the record, my favorite band is Boiled in Lead, and I am a firm but not fanatical believer in the serial comma.

Credits & Colophon

Photo of PK by Glen Blankenship copyright 2004.