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.

It's merely a fleshwound.

I haven't had any time to update lately, this costume has proven to be very intense. Which I suppose I should have known. Oh god, the pain I have put my hands through. It's truly remarkable. But we'll get to that.

So. Lots has happened, when last we spoke I was really just at the patterning stage. I'm far, far beyond that.

Let's start with the corset. I made a mockup and attempted to fit it to myself, which was extremely difficult. And turns out I didn't do a super perfect job, but I tried. I really need to remake my dressform so I can fit things properly. My own body is just too hard to get good angles on. I cut it out of the pleather and sewed it together. I definitely had concerns about the cup sizes, they looked much too big. I'm not happy about it, but I don't really have much to work with in the cup department and when I saw the size... well. But I wouldn't really know for sure until I put it on and laced it up properly. I also bought some canvas that I doubled up with the pleather, I worried about the seams ripping since sewing pleather is basically perforating it.

The whole time I'm sewing this it's all very stressful, because of the whole perforating thing. Any time I made a seam I had to know that there was no taking it back if I did it wrong. Permanent holes. No ripping out and redoing. Which I guess on the one hand is sorta nice, ripping out seams is just the worst. And each seam needs to be topstitched because I can't iron this pleather.  I once accidentally brushed the iron across the back of it and it immediately melted the top layer. Luckily it was on the inside and would be covered by the liner, so no harm done. But it scared me pretty thoroughly.

So, once it was assembled I needed to sew some boning channels and cut some boning but I was so worried about the seams. I also needed to make sure all topseams were straight and neat because they would be super visible. So I measured how wide I'd need the boning channels to be and then I actually took strips of painters tape that I cut to 3/8" strips and laid on either side of the seam allowance at each seam.

And it worked, better than I could have imagined.

Look at those beautiful, straight seams! They're so pretty I just want to keep staring at them. I immediately went online and found some rolls of 3/8" painter's tape so I don't have to cut strips every time. I plan to use it for every corset I make from now on. I just love how pretty those seams are.

I'd also been sewing the liner out of this super thin black fabric. It was pretty see-through, and as you can see, the canvas I bought was blue and white striped (I got it out of a clearance bin) and of course it showed right through the thin liner. So me, being a crazy person, couldn't live with this. So I painted the inside of the corset black. That's right. The inside of the corset. That was going to be covered by a liner. Because I'm crazy.

The boning channels fit the boning perfectly, and I put binding on the bottom edge, but not the top. I was worried that the fit of the cups would be so bad I'd have to rip them out and remake them, which would have been an awful chore. But I was really worried about the fit and willing to do it if I had to. I just wouldn't know for sure until I could lace it on properly with the right bra, and I couldn't do that until I put grommets in, and I couldn't do that until I went to someone else's house since I live in an upstairs apartment now, and that much hammering feels like a dick move. So the corset got set aside.

In the meantime, I'm multitasking. I keep bouncing from one thing to the next.  I started assembling the skirt petals:

Each petal is 1 1/4" from the next, and I only used the studs to connect them. They were pretty simple, I just lined them up and stabbed the prongs through the fabric and bent them down with a pair of pliers. It was simple, just tedious.

I had also cut out the accessory armor pieces out of floor tile foam, but ended up realizing that was going to be too thick. So I recut them from 2mm craft foam.

I had many traumatic flashbacks to cutting out the designs for my Princess Peach dress as I felt that old familiar pain in the finger joints from pressing on the Xacto knife. It was during this process that I realized that I needed a new knife, my old one was dull and had developed a fun new habit of refusing to hold any new blades. So once I'd finished this I threw it out and went and got a shiny new set.

I also knew I was very close to needing to do an awful lot of work with worbla, which meant lots of work with my heat gun and needing a surface to work with hot things.  Based on this tutorial:

https://katilistcosplay.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/working-with-worbla-safely/

I bought myself some foam core board from the dollar store and foil tape from the hardware store and made myself some worbla workstations.

I had thought based on some other things I'd seen online to use the foil tape for metallic sword blades as well, but after working with this board it dents far too easily and would be too fragile for a sword.

I got the petals all connected, and sewed them all together along with the big strips to the waistband.

It looked cool, but I was worried about the coverage. Xena shows leg, sure, but these strips showed leg all the way up, and Xena's skirt wasn't quite that revealing. After studying the show some more, and watching Kamui Cosplay's video like 8 times, I realized I needed a second offset row of wide strips underneath for more coverage, which was easy enough to cut out and add.

I also cut out all the shapes for the decoration on the knee guards:

It's just 2mm craft foam, easy peasy. I sprayed it with plastidip, which I ended up regretting because it made the edges curl up a bit. But I worked with it.

At this point it was time to stop procrastinating with the armor. I was super intimidated by the armor pieces since I'd never worked with worbla before. I sewed everything I could, leather armband pieces, knee guards, boot covers all of it, just trying to put it off. But I ran out of things to sew.  So I buckled down and decided to stop being such a baby. I have no pictures of this process because it was so labor intensive there was no time for pictures. It involved heating up pieces of worbla and sandwiching the cut out foam pieces between them and the cutting out the designs again. This was super fun because if the worbla was too hot it just squished instead of cut, not to mention, burned the living FUCK out of my fingers, but if it was too cold it was too hard to cut. The foil workstation boards I made worked really well, but they definitely retained and reflected heat. I burned my fingers again and again and again. I also covered the chakram and the sword, and spent a great deal of time sculpting all the details on the sword to make it look like Xena's.

The coolest thing about this worbla stuff is the fact that you can melt all the scraps together and mush them like clay to reuse them, not a single bit needs to go to waste. So all the scraps I cut out I just melted down and used to decorate the sword. Unfortunately it has to be quite hot for this to work, resulting in even more finger burning, plus the wear and soreness on my hands from squishing and working the worbla. The day I was cutting out the accessory armor pieces I literally spent 12 hours sitting at the kitchen table cutting those out. And I don't use literally lightly. I counted it out. I started working about 3 in the afternoon and didn't quit until after 3 in the morning. There were only brief breaks for food and bathrooms. It was... intense. But turned out so cool!

I also found it funny how much bigger my sword has ended up than the pattern I started with.

Some of those pieces required a little more work. I decided not to try and carve the little scrolly bits on the back piece, I squished up scraps and rolled them into little snakes that I arranged in the correct little curlicues. Hot burny curlicues.

Fun fact: This is the back piece upside down. I was two seconds away from panic when trying to figure out where to add the connections for the D rings for straps for wearing it before realizing that.

 The breastplate needed a lot of reshaping too.

Initially, I just covered the foam. But it was super flat. So I rolled out some worbla snakes and lined the openings.

This was better. But still not quite the shape of Xena's armor. So I grabbed my hacksaw and cut all the way through the top center and carved some of the middle out to bring the two side holes closer together. Then I rolled more worbla snakes and made the ridges bigger and more flowy shaped.

And that's what I wanted. It's still not perfect due to me not understanding the way Xena's armor is designed, but I think I recovered pretty well. In fact, a lot of my armor pieces suffer a bit from me not really understanding what I was trying to make, and if I had time and money (and new uninjured hands) I'd redo all of it with a whole different strategy, one that involved a lot more worbla snakes, but that's simply not realistic. I'm learning to use worbla, it's still going to look super cool, and someday I'll remake this costume with everything I've learned.

So, at this point, we found out that an old friend of Stu's was going to be in town and everyone was going over to Matt and Cari's for dinner later that week.

Hah. Imagine me giving up a whole evening to hang with friends instead of work on the costume. Pshhh.

However, it was an excellent opportunity for me to get all the various grommets installed in everything that needed it. That would be the corset, the boot covers, and both the upper and lower armbands. And the skirt needed some snaps, I decided that would be the best way to close it, and I already had some heavy duty snaps that would be perfect.

I did need to form the armor pieces to my arms so I could make sure the fabric and everything was in the right place for the grommets. I figured I'd have to glue the worbla pieces on after I painted them.

So I taped the pleather pieces on my arm, heated up the worbla pieces and shaped them over my arms.






















Haha, geez, I look so sleep deprived.

Aaaand then come to find out that the hot worbla fused itself to the pleather. Like, I-Live-Here-Now I-Will-Wreck-Your-Life-If-You-Try-To-Remove-Me fused. Sooooooo I guess I wasn't going to paint them separately.

I spent the whole evening hammering grommets. Who needs to hang out with friends, right? I counted later, it was a total of 108 grommets. And two snaps. I got blisters in two places on my right hand from the hammer, and my hands and arms were sore from my fingertips to my elbows. And hammering grommets into those armbands with the worbla attached was not easy. But I managed.

I ended up not being able to use the pleather pieces I made for my shoulder pieces, they came out all wonky, so I just cut out worbla pieces and covered them with pleather. It worked much better.

I also made the cups of the breastplate and attached them. Those were just the basic sphere cups I'd patterned out earlier. But now I needed to do the breastplate decorations. I had the pattern, I cut them out of the floor tile foam and carved them into shape with my Dremel.  All of this made me realize I need to get a new Dremel. I have a cheap ass one speed one and it's so, so hard to work with. But once I had the foam carved I realized it was going to be way too thick.

I went and got myself some 5mm foam and recut and recarved, and covered in worbla. It was much too flat, like the breastplate, so I rolled more worbla snakes and added ridges. And lots of finger burns.

You can see the difference with them side by side. Hilariously enough they still ended up thicker than I wanted, but they work. I just had to heat them up and attach them. The ridges gave them a weird bumpy surface but I figured I could gesso and sand that out.

Seriously, though. I cannot emphasize enough how often I burned myself, either on the hot worbla, or hot foil tape board. I realize the heat was necessary, but daaaaaaaamn. I need heat resistant nonstick gloves so bad.

Let's see, what else did I do... Oh! I painted the medallion for the front of the corset. For some reason the one that came with the hardware kit from Todd's Costumes was copper colored. So I painted it black and then rubbed gold Rub N Buff across the top.

Once I had the grommets in I was able to fit the corset properly. The cups are a bit big, but if I wear my regular padded push up bra with the silicone inserts I bought a while back it nearly fills it out and works well enough. If I ever remade it I'd definitely fix it though.

I was also able to glue the boot covers to the boots, after adding the rivets and cording to the back and then lacing up the front.

This was shockingly hard to do, because I made the mistake of buying cheap cord from the craft section of Walmart, which was a huge mistake. It had multiple weak spots that just snapped when I tried to pull on it, so it's super glued together in multiple places.

Since I had the grommets in my armor pieces, it was time to work on painting them. I gave them several coats of wood glue and then a coat of black paint, followed by gold Rub N Buff and black air brushing for a worn and dirty look.

I'm not worried about a perfect smooth finish on these, since Xena's are hammered metal. I might try and shine them up a little more. Maybe some lighter gold highlights or something. I don't know.

The knee guards required a lot more rivets, which was just more tedious work. The studs are super easy. Arranging the foam decorations required some time and careful placement, and I used black Rub N Buff to patch up any places in the black paint I'd covered the foam in. I then covered the surface in gold Rub N Buff and added black airbrushed shadows to those as well. I sewed elastic to the edges for wearing, I didn't really want buckles of D rings behind my knees.

Whoof. This costume is so massive, just documenting everything I did is exhausting.

I was starting to run a little low on things that I could do inside in the evenings, so it was finally time to start on the sword sheath. I traced a vague sword shape on the 5mm foam, glued it into a tube, covered it in more pleather, with a frayed border on one side, braided some leather cord and made some worbla disks with abalone shell in the middle for decoration. Using my leather punch I punched holes and stitched my thick cord along one side as well.

I know I've said this before, but I swear someday I'm going to make myself a little photo booth so I can get good pictures of the things I've made.

I've attached one hook clip to the back to clip it to the back of my corset, but I'm not sure where to place the second hook to secure it yet, I need to line it up with the armor.

The sword, chakram and breastplate are currently in the process of being gesso'd, sanded and painted, but that's really all that's left at this point.

Honestly. This thing is so detailed I'm really having a hard time documenting everything I've done. There's just. So. Much. But the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to glow and I think I might just survive. I've got a dozen ideas on how I'd do this differently if I could start over based on what I've learned doing this, but I suppose I never would have learned it if I hadn't done it this way first. And it's still going to be really cool. But my poor hands may never recover. The burns, the blisters, the soreness and pain. Today I put my finger directly in a large pool of fresh hot glue, and removing the glue tore open the hangnail I already had on that finger due to the abuse my hands have taken. My fingers are stained and battered and I think I'm going to go get and hand mask and a manicure after this is all over. My hands need some kindness, I think.

And now it's super late and trying to remember everything I did has worn out my brain. Hopefully I'll have finished pictures for you soon.