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.