Part One: The Corset
Part Two: The Skirt and The Boots ***You are here***
Part Three: The Main Armor Pieces: The Breastplate and the Backplate
Part Four: The Accessory Armor Pieces: The Shoulders, The Armbands, and the Kneeguards
Part Five: The Weapons
Part Six: The Hair, The Eyes, The Makeup and Playing The Part
PART TWO
THE SKIRT AND THE BOOTS
We'll start with the skirt.
Materials:
~2 yds of pleather
matching brown thread
lining fabric for the waistband
2 heavy duty snaps
snap setting tool
143 4 pronged flat antique bronze studs
leather punch
rubber mallet
black fabric paint (optional, if you're a crazy person like me and your pleather isn't black on the back)
So, Xena's skirt is one of those things that looks complicated but is really simple, just tedious. It's just made up of many, many flaps. The top layer is made of strips of smaller flaps, and there are two layers of offset wider flaps underneath.
First of all, a pattern to base things on:
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| https://www.instructables.com/id/Xena-Costume/ |
So there are 13 strips of 11 petals each. That means you're going to need 143 of these. The pattern will give you a decent place to start. My petals ended up being about 2 1/4" long and 1 3/4" wide, and rounded at one end, of course. I traced them all onto pleather and spent a few evenings very tediously cutting each one out by hand. It really made me wish I had a punch or a laser cutter or something. But I got it done.
Also, if you're crazy like me, you can paint the back of your flaps black. My fabric was grey on the back and I simply couldn't stand the thought of the flaps potentially flipping over while I was moving around and showing that clashing grey, so I got some black fabric paint and painted them.
Yes. I realize how unnecessary that is. I did it anyways.
To connect the petals, you can use rivets if you like. The Todd's Costumes kit-
does come with rivets intended for this purpose, but they're much too small and there aren't even enough of them. You can buy bigger rivets, but for some reason I've never been good at getting rivets set solidly. One of the ones I used to attach my chakram hook to my corset actually came undone at the party I wore it to, so clearly this is not a talent of mine. Combine that with the fact that I live in an upstairs apartment now and didn't really want to do a lot of hammering, I decided to buy some pronged nailhead studs instead. After careful studying of screenshots and watching the show, I determined I needed 8mm flat antique gold ones. The ones I got are here:
And yes, I realize those are 9mm. I spent two days searching for exactly what I wanted, but I never could find it, there was always at least one thing wrong. I actually initially bought another kind:
But these are domed rather than flat and I ended up not liking them. I kept them though, I'm sure I can find a use for them.
Anyways, I bought 400 of them and only have a small handful left over the course of the whole costume. So make sure to get at least 400.
Once I had all the petals cut out, I laid them out one at a time, overlapping. I spaced them 1 1/4" from one end of the petal to the next. I hate having to mess with rulers or measuring tapes when I only need things to be a small consistent space apart, so I used I trick I've used before and made a square of paper that was exactly 1 1/4" on each side, reinforced it with tape, and then used that square to measure the distance between petals. It gets easy, consistent results.
So I would lay one petal on my self healing cutting mat, lay a second one over top, make sure the distance was correct, and everything was straight, and then I'd place the stud roughly evenly spaced on the lower half of the petal. Press down on the stud so the prongs poke through, push the prongs all the way through, and then bend them down and everything is held neatly in place. At first I used a pair of pliers to bend the prongs, but found that it was much easier to use a butter knife or the edge of a small metal ruler I happened to have on hand. The studs hold the petals together perfectly, so there's no need for any additional attachment. The other thing I like about using studs instead of rivets is the studs don't allow the petals to rotate, where with rivets, they'd be able to spin around the posts. I don't know if that would actually cause problems or not, but I'm just as a happy to avoid it.
These strips will end up about 15" long. If you need it shorter, you can space the petals closer together, or I suppose you could use fewer petals as well, my crazy detail perfect brain just couldn't handle that. Lucky for me I'm tall with long legs, so 15" is about right.
Each strip of petals will need a wider strip of pleather behind it. These were the same length, and for width, you'll want to divide your waist by 13 so they fit evenly end to end all the way around. For me that ended up about 2 3/4" wide. They're basically just big wide petals, cut out and rounded on one end.
Next, and this is really important, you will need a second row of big strips underneath and offset from the first row. Obviously this skirt is going to show some leg, that's just the nature of the design, but you need the second row in order to make sure you're not showing too much leg. The flaps won't actually cover anything without the second row. I didn't realize this until I'd already finished everything else on the skirt, which meant sewing back over seams to attach the second row of flaps, which did exactly what I was afraid it would- excessively perforating the pleather and made the first set of flaps into basically tear off tabs on a "Take One" poster. When getting ready for the party yesterday my friend was helping me adjust the skirt and one of the flaps ripped right off. I was able to glue it back on, but all those flaps have that same weakness, and I wish I hadn't had to stitch so many times over them. But at this point all I can do is keep that in mind if I ever remake this costume, which I would really like to do, based on how much I learned making this.
The waistband is just a wide strip of pleather, mine started out 3" wide, tapering to 4" in the middle. I could be wrong, but it looks to me like the front of the skirt is slightly longer in front. Although after sewing it kind of lost it's taper, so I guess it's not really that important.
The skirt sits high on the hips so the waistband is completely hidden by the corset. Keep in mind that the corset- if you actually made a compressing corset, is going to make your waist smaller, which you'll need to account for when figuring out how big around the skirt needs to be, you don't want to end up with a loose skirt slipping down.
It overlaps in back by about 2" so that the wide flaps meet up in the back and there is an offset flap covering the closure in back. I also lined the inside with the same thin black fabric I lined the corset in, I didn't want the pleather right against my skin under the corset, that sounded sweaty and uncomfortable.
If you look at the picture you can see I trimmed down the top of the flaps a bit, I was worried about it being too long. Finished and sewn to the waistband, the flaps ended up about 14 1/2" long.
I had thought to add grommets and have it lace up in back, but I decided that was going to be unnecessary effort since it would be covered by the corset anyways, so I ended up setting 2 heavy duty snaps in back which worked just fine. They were silver, so I painted them with a paint called Patina meant specifically for metal in Ancient Bronze to make it match the costume.
And with that, you have a skirt! See? That wasn't so bad, just tedious and repetitive.
Next up, the boots!
Materials:
Knee high brown boots
half a yard of pleather
matching brown thread
50 or 60 size 0 antique gold grommets
grommet setting tool
~20 4 pronged flat antique bronze studs
3 or 4 yards of brown leather cord
leather punch
rubber mallet
contact cement, or glue of choice as long as it's flexible and works with pleather.
I apologize for the vagueness of the amounts, your specific numbers are going to vary based on your size. When in doubt, too much is always better than not enough.
So, seriously, save yourself some heartache, and buy yourself a pair of brown lace-up boots. It's a pretty simple basic design, you should be able to find boots like that easily enough. And then you can add the rivets and cording to the back in the same way I'll describe in a bit. It'll save you so much time. I did not do this, so I will tell you what I did instead. My way is perhaps more budget friendly but more difficult.
So, I bought myself some tall brown boots from the thrift store. This is cheaper than buying new boots, but I then had to make boot covers to make sure they look right.
It's not in the picture because I'd already removed them, but the boots originally had straps around the top with buckles that I cut off and saved for later use.
So, to make the boot covers, I used the same plastic wrap and duct tape method I used to make the corset pattern. Cover one of the boots with plastic wrap and duct tape, then draw the seams. Same deal as before.
I left a gap in the front for the lacing to go across and cut and additional rectangle to be the "tongue" underneath the lacing. I cut additional strips of pleather to use as facing around the edges to make everything neat, basically just sewing right sides together around the edges, flipping under and top-stitching it down. I put grommets in down either side of the front- the same ones I used on the corset- which you can get here:
The setting tool I use is here:
Technically you can quit here, the detail on the back of Xena's boots isn't really that visible, but if you've gone this far than I assume you care about details as much as I do. There are studs and cording zig-zagging up the back of the boots and I love getting the details right.
I trapped one end of some brown leather cord under a stud about an inch to one side of the seam up the back of the boot cover. I then hooked the cord around one prong of a stud and placed that one an inch to the other side of the seam and about an inch up higher. I just kept doing this, zig-zagging back and forth across the seam up the back, trapping the cord under one prong of each stud until I got to the top. Repeat for the other one. Easy peasy.
For the record- If you just bought lace up boots and are adding the studs and cord to the back, I do have concerns that the prongs of the studs would be sharp and pokey on the back of your legs, you might want to consider gluing a strip of fabric or felt on the inside over the folded down prongs, just for comfort.
I glued the zippers on the boots shut and cut off the pull tabs, after making sure I could slip the boots on without unzipping them of course. After that I just glued the boot covers to the boots, making sure to leave some space where the grommets were so they could be laced up. I added brown leather cord for lacing, and was able to use the cheap Walmart stuff I'd bought before since it was purely decorative.
The best part is that these are really just totally normal looking boots, I plan to continue to wear them for normal use. They're just brown boots with a cool extra detail on the back.
And now you have boots! I will cover the knee guards in a future post, I'm trying really hard not to pile too much into one post.
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