I have many skills.

It's finished! I still need good pictures of it all put together, I have one with some of my friends for the party last Friday, but that's the only one I have so far and I need more. I think what I'm going to do is on Saturday for the other party I have to go to I'll get a bunch of good pictures of me in the costume and then I'm going to make a more organized Xena tutorial post. Don't worry, I'll post the pictures first so if all you want is to see the finished thing you can skip over the rest since I'm basically going to repeat these last few posts, but I want to basically write a beginning to end tutorial on making the costume. I had a few resources I worked with but the instructables used a totally different method for the armor, and Kamui Cosplay's video, which was the finished product I liked most, flies through it really fast, I really would have liked a more detailed organized breakdown. So now that I've done it, I'm going to make one, detailing everything in order and what I learned and what I would do differently if I was going to do it again. It's the same thing I did when I made that Rinoa jacket. You get to see my process, and then I make a nice neat tutorial in case anyone needs it in the future.

So. I was nearing the finish line as of my last post.

First of all, I'm going to once again demonstrate what a crazy person I am. I gave the weapons and breastplate two coats of sandable filler primer, same stuff I used on my Sailor Pluto staff and my Captain Hook hook. It works really well for perfecting the surface. But everything only got two coats because that's exactly how far a single can goes and I didn't want to go buy more. I decided any imperfections at that point were battle damage. I didn't need a mirror finish like I tried on my hook, Xena's a warrior, not a fancy pirate captain. Her weapons see a lot more rough usage.

I gave the sword and the breastplate a solid coat of Plastidip, to make the base black.  Before I was going to do that to the chakram though I wanted to get the designs on there. I planned to use a wood burner to carve the designs because honestly, I have terrible control with my dremel. There was a zero percent chance I'd be able to carve those nice straight lines. A wood burner would be easier to work with. And I didn't think the fumes released from burning Plastidip would be good for my health.

So I cut out my pattern for the designs using the pattern from the first instructable that had been resized to be roughly 10" across. I laid the stencil on my chakram and...

Can you see it? Can you see why I recoiled in absolute horror with an absolutely sick feeling in my stomach? Can yoU SEE IT? CAN ANYONE SEE IT BUT ME?

LOOK. Look how wobbly and uneven the edge is. Look how it's farther from the edge of the design on one side than the other. It's. So. Bad. And I don't care if anyone believes me. I've shown it to a few people now and most people just smile and nod and take a few steps slowly back. BUT I KNOW IT'S THERE. AND IT'S BAD. I'M NOT CRAZY. YOU'RE THE ONE THAT'S CRAZY.

So I started over. From scratch. Two days before the party. I just completely 100 percent scrapped this one.

I ended up cutting a new one from the 5mm foam because I had kind of thought I might like it if it were thinner, and since I had the thinner foam anyways I figured I might as well. And honestly, I had the new one cut and worbla covered inside an hour. I had to add a little extra worbla around the edge to create a blade, because it was rather late at night when I was doing this and I wasn't going to dremel an edge on the foam at this point. I think I should have though, my chakram is just a bit wider than I would like.

And just loooooooook how much more even and round that one is! I had a slight problem getting it to be perfectly flat though. I heated it and pressed it flat, flipping it repeatedly and pressing on both sides and it cooled warped. I heated it and held it down in one place and it cooled warped. I heated it and pressed it flat on the table and covered it with my flat cutting mat that I put a large frying pan of water on top of and left it there for four hours, and the damn thing cooled warped. So I gave up. My chakram is a little warped. But at least it's evenly round.

I then had to gesso and sand the new chakram, but I only had enough gesso left for two coats.  And as you know, I was already out of spray primer. So to get it smoother when two coats of gesso wasn't enough,  I spent some time using Kwikseal to even out the blade edge. If you get your fingers wet after applying it you can actually get some pretty impressive smoothness. To finish everything evenly and smoothly I pulled out a little tub of spackle Stu had and covered the whole damn thing in it. And it totally worked. Nice smooth surface. Kinda made me wish I'd done that to the sword as well so it would be smoother, but my sword just ended up impressively worn.

At this point I taped down the design pattern to the stencil and just started carving it in with my wood burner. I discovered as well that if I carved out the circle where each of the beads were supposed to go and just sorta stabbed the spot a few times until the worbla was nice and mushy, I could just press the beads directly into the place where they were meant to go, hold them there for a moment, and they would just set right in place, flush with the surface and fixed in by the natural adhesive properties of worbla.

I had learned from some experiments earlier that I can totally sand over the beads, and just putting a glossy topcoat over them restores them to their previous shine, so I didn't have to worry about sanding over this a bit to make everything smooth.

For the record- the reason I put the beads in now before painting was the same reason I did it before the Plastidip- burning paint chemicals. I did all this with the sword as well, it has several beads set into the hilt.

I don't have any in progress pictures of the other side of the chakram because honestly that side didn't go as well. The spackle coating would kind of crumble away in the places where the design came to a sharp point. I definitely wouldn't use spackle again but it served well enough at crunch time.

Because the beads were already set in, I also spent some time cutting out little circles of painter's tape so I wouldn't have to try to paint around the beads. It didn't take as long as I thought I would and worked perfectly, allowing me to spray with Plastidip, cover with Rub N Buff and airbrush details.

During this time I also got my back armor piece and breastplate covered in Rub N Buff. I was using the Antique Gold color and ended up using the entire tube once I was done with all the armor pieces. The breastplate took most of it.

This is what it looked like with just the flat gold. Pretty awful, right?

And this is what we got after extensive black airbrushing. Damn, that looks cool, even with my amateur-this-is-only-the-third-time-I've-used-an-airbrush skills. I covered them with a coat of semi-gloss polycrylic, that actually ended up coming out too shiny, so then I sprayed them with a clear matte topcoat which removed that shine beautifully and gave it the perfect dull metallic shine I wanted, I was super pleased with how that came out, especially since that was unplanned. You'll see that in the finished pictures, it was still shiny here.

I also remembered about this time that all my accessory armor pieces needed rivets around the edges. Now, I wasn't able to drive the prongs of my studs directly into the worbla. If I wanted to do that I should have remembered to put the studs in before painting so I could warm the worbla a little. It just cools to a really hard plastic, and you really can't do too much with it then. And heating it would ruin the paint job. So using wire cutters from my jewelry tools I just cut all the prongs off of a bunch of studs and glued them down with E6000. A little bit of black Rub N Buff to make them also look worn, a coat of polycrylic to seal them down, and we were good to go.

Once the paint job was done on the breastplate and backplate I was also ready to attach them to the shoulder pieces. I made straps for the back using pieces of an old brown purse I had scavenged for hardware ages ago and saved the strap pieces because I always thought they'd be useful someday. (Which, coincidentally, is the motto of my people, the crafters. "It'll be useful someday!") The side straps were going to be made from straps and buckles that were originally decorative elements around the tops of the boots I used for Xena, obviously with boot covers covering the whole boots those didn't need to be there, and they were just so convenient for buckling me into my armor.

The front of the armor pieces are connected by little squiggly pieces of wire. I had bought some pretty hefty copper wire from the hardware store and using a wire mandrel from my jewelry supplies, was able to bend it into perfect little loops.

Buuuuuuut I had only bought two feet thinking I'd need roughly a foot for each side, and turned out I needed like a foot and a half. So day before the party (And my birthday, coincidentally) I had to stop at the hardware store to buy more wire. I covered the wire in a paint called Patina meant specifically to paint metal- I had some from way back during my brief steampunk phase I had used to paint an overly shiny pocket watch. I'd also used it on the snaps on the back of the skirt, I couldn't have that bright silver or copper showing, it wouldn't match! I also gave the squiggles a clear top coat. The worbla tubes I had made in the breastplate and shoulder pieces were nice and snug and everything fit perfectly and securely.

So, I still had to paint and weather my weapons. I had sort of started with the sword, but the chakram had only been plastidipped. And then I had to go and have a birthday, where, like, people wanted to hang out with me and whatever. Weirdos. I agreed, I but I never agreed to stop working on my costume, since my birthday was literally the day before the party. I went to Cari's, we had a low key thing with dinner and cheesecake and a few friends.

Also, oh my god, look at this cheesecake they made for me. Cheesecake is my favorite cake, Cari makes delicious cheesecake and Sarah is a cake decorator. Isn't is amazing? And it was delicious.

I ended up managing to finish my sword, and I got the gold and silver down on the chakram, so it just needed weathering and clear coat. And then I stayed up until like sunrise with Cari drinking wine. It was my birthday, dammit!

I went home the next day, rubbed the chakram down with some watered down acrylic paint- that worked better than the Rub N Buff for some reason on both the sword and the chakram- sprayed it with a clear coat, and then attached the straps and buckles to the sides of my armor. All of this I did while letting some semi-permanent black dye sit in my hair. I still had like three quarters of a bottle left from when I dyed my hair for Chain Chomp, and I already have Xena's hair style, with the braided black headband I had bought some time ago. If I could get out of wearing a wig I was totally going to. I got those last few steps done, rinsed out the dye, and then laid down and napped for like three hours.

See? I had plenty of time to spare.

The leather grip on the sword, by the way, is just the super cheap leather cord I bought from Walmart and used for the braid on the sheath, lightly rubbed down with black Rub N Buff to darken it.

You can see that the spiky side of the chakram is messier, but it's not awful. I did what I could with paint. Part of me wonders if in a future version I could do a shiny clean chakram. Xena's honestly doesn't look that worn. But that's for a future project.

The party was a great deal of fun, although I discovered while getting ready that the shoulder straps on the corset were like an inch too long and floated right off my shoulders, so I had to take it off and shorten them. Shortening them wasn't hard, getting in and out of that corset was. Man, I hate getting in and out of a corset that doesn't have a front opening. I got myself properly drunk, learned that I really can't dance in this outfit because I overheat instantaneously, and impressed everyone with how cool I looked. I also overdid it after staying up drinking the night before and ended up with the Worst. Hangover. Ever. It was bad. Several of my friends had planned to go downtown yesterday night to a Halloween bar crawl but I literally spent all day puking. It was the worst hangover I've ever had and I tapped out hard at the idea of A: standing and walking around, B: Wearing a corset, and C: Drinking anything alcoholic ever again. Yeah. It was one of those never-gonna-drink-again hangovers. We all know those promises never last, but god. That was not fun. And I'm still not completely recovered. But it happens.

Anyways. I will be back with all put together pictures very soon. Now that I'm done I feel so.... lost. Like there's something I should be doing, but I don't know what it is. That kind of intense project focus is one of my favorite things, and now it's just..... gone. But you know me. I'm sure there will be a new one soon.