Why I’m Finally Letting Steampunk Take Over
Our Life Interrupted didn’t get a new name. It got a confession instead.
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For years, this site was one thing: a fairly ordinary record of family life. What’s changed isn’t the title on the tab, it’s the honesty behind it. So before anything else gets posted here, I wanted to sit down and actually explain what happened — not as an announcement, but as the first entry in what this site is now.
What This Site Was Supposed to Be
The original plan for Our Life Interrupted was a joint project, built around family life. I’m not a parent myself, and the joint version of it never quite found its footing. What was left, for a while, was a domain I kept meaning to figure out what to do with.
That’s not a dramatic story, and I don’t want to make it one. Plans don’t work out sometimes, and this one didn’t. What matters more is what was quietly sitting underneath it the whole time, waiting for the site to catch up.
The Part That Was Always True
I’ve been a genuine steampunk fan for a long time. Quietly, in the background, in the way you love something without ever quite building your life around it in public.
I used to make steampunk jewellery, back when I ran a handmade jewellery business — years before the aesthetic had anywhere near the following it has now. I’ve read more steampunk fiction than I could reasonably list if you asked me to. I have my own steampunk town, slowly growing, tile by tile, in Minecraft. And when my 3D printers first arrived, some of the very first things I sketched out were steampunk pieces. Ideas that are, if I’m honest, still sitting in a folder, waiting to actually get made.
That folder is basically where this site comes in.
A Quick Note on How Some of This Will Get Made
Not everything in that folder is going to become a physical object right away, and I’d rather be upfront about that than pretend otherwise. Space and budget are both real constraints, and I don’t want either one to be the reason an idea never gets shared at all. So from time to time, you’ll see AI-generated images standing in for a piece that isn’t built yet — a way of exploring an idea out loud before it exists in brass and resin. It’s not a substitute for the real thing. It’s just honesty about the order things happen in.
Letting It Into the House Properly
So that’s what this site is now: an honest account of what happens when a hobby you’ve loved from a distance finally gets let into the house properly.
Not a costume for a weekend. Not a con-only interest kept in a box between events. The actual, ongoing, slightly gear-shaped shape of my life, written about the way it happens rather than tidied up for an audience. Turns out it was steampunk all along.
What You’ll Find Here
The site is organized around three places, and they’ll probably grow as things get made rather than the other way around.
Fashion & Style is about building a wardrobe that works beyond the con — the everyday version of this aesthetic, not just the special-occasion one.
The Maker’s Workshop covers builds, tools, and the 3D printed pieces finally getting made, folder by folder, including the ones that started as an AI-generated image before they were anything else.
Field Notes — where you’re reading right now — is the unfiltered diary. Minecraft town included.
If You’re New Here
If you’re already deep into this world, welcome. You’ll probably recognize a lot of what’s coming.
If you’re steampunk-curious and don’t know where to start, you’re in good company, because that was me for a long time too — reading about it, making small pieces of it, never quite calling it what it was. This site is, in part, the version of that starting point I wish I’d had.
Next up: what’s actually in that folder, and why the 3D printing side of this is where I think there’s the most interesting ground still uncovered.
Follow along as the folder empties out, one piece at a time.
