Drinking wine is just more fun this way....

So, in the vein of catching up on things I didn't blog about  that I made and still want to get put up here, over the course of the last..... 7 months or so, where you didn't hear from me at all, I also made.... um, 6 new wine glasses. Although to be fair one of them I made last night.

Someday, I'm going to buy a house again, and when I do, I'm going to get a big pretty china hutch that I can display all these wineglasses in, because they are so cool, and I am so proud of them, I really want to be able to show them off better. A closed off little cupboard just isn't what they deserve.

So. First of all. I was by no means done making Mario creatures.

The Bob-Omb! God, he turned out so cute. I bought another one of the little globe vases I had used for my Boo glasses, and covered him in black clay. His feet were little chicken nugget shaped and sized pieces of foil that I covered in gold clay, his wind up handle was just sorta free handed cut out of gold clay and his fuse is just twisted snakes of clay with some wire in the middle to hold it up. Once he was baked his feet ended up being too rounded in the back so he wasn't very steady on his feet, so I actually added more clay to his heels to give him more stability. I didn't want to worry about him tipping over when he's full of wine, since he's not very centered on the feet. I've already had his wind up handle fall off once, but it was easy to super glue back on. The silver lip makes it a little interesting to drink out of, but nothing too complicated. Nothing like my darling moogle who bops me on the nose with his bobble if I don't hold it out of the way.




Next up!

Wine barrel wine glass! This was the last one from the set of colored ones I bought, and for some reason it took me a while to come up with a good one for the purple one. But I saw a picture online of a wine glass that looked like a barrel and knew it was perfect. I didn't have any brown clay on hand at the time, but I had a ton of black left from the Bob-Omb, so I just covered it in black and painted it. It took a while to carve all the wood grain, but it ended up looking so cool. I also did a watered down black paint wash to highlight all the details. And then.... While taking these pictures, I set the glass on the table a little too hard apparently and snapped the base right off. I was so mad. Just clean off. I tried gluing it back on, but it didn't hold, so I took it out back, and very delicately smashed the rest of the stem off with a hammer.  I used some spare clay to make a short base between the glass and the base and now the glass looks like this:

I just flatly refused to let it be broken, and now it's just a lil shorty! Still holds wine just fine.

Next up, after going to Emerald City con, I really wanted more Mario glasses. So...

Shy Guy! 

I decided I didn't want to do a full body Shy Guy, because the shape of his mask was just perfect for a stemless wine glass. And I had a lot of red Sculpey Souffle left over because I'd bought it for my chain chomp earrings, but only needed a tiny scrap for the mouths. So I covered him all over with red, except for a big black oval in front, made a fairly thick white oval that I cut the eyes and mouth out of, and then laid that over top the black, so the mask is very three dimensional and everything. He was super simple but turned out so cool. 

So, at this point I thought I had pretty well covered Mario. I wanted to do a Koopa but hadn't really figured out how, so I started to look for a different franchise to hit. Stu and I had been playing Chrono Trigger at the time, and I decided I wanted to make a Nu.

I'm including multiple references here, because I really want you to know what he's supposed to look like. 

Side note- the watercolor-y Nu with the pretty background can be bought as a print here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/203319609/chrono-trigger-nu-portrait-art-print-of

It also just happens to be a piece of art I bought at my first con for Stu because he loves Chrono Trigger so much. Very talented artist. 

Anyways. I searched all over for the perfect wine glass, I wanted a short stemmed pear-shaped glass- I think glasses like that are traditionally for brandy or something? I don't know. Anyways, I found just what I wanted at a thrift store and I had a plan.

And oh my god, I can't believe how great he came out. Lucky for me, my favorite brand of clay, Kato Polyclay, already comes in the perfect shade of blue, so I covered the glass up to around 3/4 of an inch from the top. I added some extra in the front for his mouth and nose, and then carefully made indents for them and filled them with black clay. The curve I got for his mouth is just... so perfect. And his eyes... god. I got his expression freaking perfect. His arms had to be positioned around his body, they would have just been too fragile hanging at his side. His hair was just a triangle of green clay that I shredded up with a sculpting tool edge. It ended up being too dark, so the color you see there I actually painted on. I originally built his legs up against the stem for sturdiness but didn't like the way it looked, so I just gently pried them out with a flat object and rounded his knees, so he's have that perfect bent kneed look. He's probably my favorite glass, honestly. I really love him. 

So, after this, I finally came up with a plan for a Koopa glass. I decided I wouldn't do a full Koopa, I just couldn't figure out a way that the head and limbs wouldn't be terribly awkward to drink around plus just plain difficult to make. So I decided just to do a Koopa shell.

It's just a stemless wineglass covered in yellow and green clay with a long white snake for the edge, and details carved on by hand. I think it turned out pretty good. And it's pretty easy to drink out of, which isn't always true with these glasses.

Last but not least. 

I took a long break from making these wine glasses once I knew I was going to be moving. I didn't want to make more things to move, plus I had no idea what my storage situation would be like in an apartment. (Bad. It's bad. My apartment has so little storage space it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And I still gave an entire cupboard just to my wine glass collection.) We've been in the apartment a few months and I just hadn't come up with an idea until fairly recently when Stu and I were playing Dragon Quest 5 and then followed it with 3. Dragon Quest 8 is one of my favorite games in the world, and 5 and 3 were super fun, I really love the Dragon Quest series so I decided I needed a Dragon Quest slime. I looked all over in thrift stores for a glass like the one I used for the Nu, and found one that was the same shape, just smaller. Which wasn't ideal, but would work. I blended up a lighter shade of blue just because I didn't want it to look too much like the Nu, covered the glass and added the face.

Normally I'd show you more pictures, but really, there's not much to see here. His face is really simple, it took me very little time to have him look exactly right. He's adorable and I love him. He's hard to photograph though, I always have issues with lighting and he's somewhat smaller than my usual glass, so it's hard to get a good shot.

Someday, I'm gonna make myself a little photobooth so I can get good photos of my creations.

But that's it! That's all the wine glasses to date. I have an extra plain glass at the moment, it was one I thought might work for the slime until I found the one I used, which was better, and I'm thinking I'd like to turn this extra one into a Xena glass. It seems appropriate. I have this image of her chakram forming a ring around the middle of the glass, with the edge pointing outwards, but I'm not sure how yet. We'll see.

Oh, side note, another minor project I took on for myself when we moved into the apartment. Due to the limited cupboard space, the combination of my cool mug collection and my cool wine glass collection meant that I was gonna have a problem. So after some Pinterest research, I went on a grand adventure all over town to find me a wooden pallet, which was way harder than I think it should have been, and I ended up stealing a partially broken one from the back of a Whole Foods, brought it home, sanded, painted and added hooks to create a super cool mug rack I could set up against the wall on the island in the kitchen.

It's much fuller now, I used to have a selection of mugs I kept at work for coffee, but now that I work from home all my mugs are home.

I did have some drama making this. I broke two screwdriver tips screwing in the hooks- apparently the screwdriver set in the tool kit I bought when I first moved out on my own is some pretty cheap shit. But the biggest drama was the feet.

So, the bottom board on one of the sides of the pallet was broken. That was fine with me, I removed the board on the other side to create a gap so that we can still reach the outlet and the garbage disposal switch that you can barely see there behind the mugs. But it was still down a little low if I just rested it on it's own wooden beams. So I decided to get some kind of bowl or something to attach to the beams to lift it up. I found some cheap plastic flower pots at the thrift store. 

MISTAAAAAAAAKE.

The bottoms of those flower pots were so thin and brittle they shattered at the slightest bump once I had screwed them to the bottom of the pallet's beams. It was infuriating. I'd have been better of with terracotta pots. But once I had them I was determined to make them work. I ended up basically replacing the bottoms with thermoplastic beads and worbla, and screwing them to the beams with the biggest screws and widest washers I could fit. I then dumped a solid two inches of white glue into each pot while it was upside down and spending something like two weeks letting it try to reinforce it even more. In the end I still don't really trust the feet, but they're holding. And I have a cool display for my mugs! Once I have a house and a china hutch though I'll probably scrap this thing and use the materials for something else. I'd rather have everything displayed in a pretty hutch, there's just nowhere for it to go in the apartment. The stuff we already had barely made it.

Anyways. I think that gets you pretty caught up on things I made over the last half a year. I'm still hard at work on Xena, but haven't done enough to be worth updating yet. I'll get back to you.

In a time of ancient gods, warlords and kings, a land in turmoil cried out for a hero.

She was Xena, a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle. The power...the passion...the danger. Her courage will change the world.

It's finally time. I've wanted to make Xena's outfit for a long time, but I've always been intimidated by the armor pieces and the weapons. Prop making is hard, man. And I've struggled with both the props I've made, but I feel like they came out well in the end and I learned a lot. So I'm going for it. I even have a Gabrielle, Amanda and I have always wanted to do a costume together, and I'm tall and dark and she's small and blonde. It's gonna be so great. If I don't lose my mind in the details.

Good god, the details.

I gave myself a week off after con, because con is always a pretty major thing, and then I got to work. If I was gonna get all this done, I needed as much time as I could manage. Back in February when my group was waffling on our costumes for Emerald City Comicon and I was itching for a project, I had bought some pleather fabric, some boots, beads and hardware for the costume, and found a few online tutorials and even some printable patterns for the armor that I was pretty excited about. I had a decent plan. I didn't get any real work done because then I had con, and then we moved over the summer, and with my previous job being a dumpster fire all the time, I just didn't have the energy for anything else. But things are better now and Halloween is coming!

So, to get started, I made a duct tape pattern for the corset with Stu's help- you know the drill, covered my torso in duct tape and drew the desired seamlines on it and cut it out. I used that for a pattern to make a mockup, which fit pretty well, just a little big all around because I hadn't made the seams quite wide enough, an easy fix when I sewed the final thing together. 

I also drew a circle around the boob of the side I didn't use for a pattern and cut that out to be the pattern for the cup of the breatplate.  I had to make a few adjustments to the way the bust fit, but everything looks pretty good. I've got it cut out of the pleather now, waiting to be sewn. I plan to construct it like a regular corset, I made the pattern while I was wearing a corset, fully boned and lined.

Next, I had to make sure all my patterns were the correct size. I got the patterns from here:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Xena-Costume/

She has a pattern for the corset, but she must have a short AF torso, because there was never a chance that would fit me. I didn't even look at it twice, I always knew I'd have to take the duct tape pattern route.  She also had a lot of construction ideas, but I don't like the way she did the armor. I plan to follow Kamui Cosplay's armor strategy, that I got here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvTOZ3-guoc&t=222s

So. To make the patterns the right size for me, I took some measurements on myself to figure out  how big I wanted them, and then, using the information I got from the internet telling me that 96 pixels is 1 inch, resized the images to the correct proportions. I'm sure there's better ways to do this, I just don't know them so this is how I figured it out. I then took my images to https://rasterbator.net/ that would split my images into a multi-page PDF that I could then print off and use as a pattern printed out life size. All this really made me wish I had real Photoshop, because I'm pretty sure all of this is really easy to do with that.  Oh well. I got there. 

I printed out my patterns at Staples, since I no longer work in an office with a printer I can borrow, and I don't have a printer of my own.

Using some fancy math and looking at proportions of Xena holding her weapons, I figured out her sword should be about 27 inches for me, and the chakram should be 10, so those images were resized as well. I traced those designs onto some paper, took them outside and sprayed expanding foam all over them.

There's two so I could do top and bottom at the same time, since a can of spray foam is really a one time deal, there's no capping it off and using the rest later, it will seal itself. 

Well, I had miscalculated by using paper as the base. When the foam had fully cured, it looked like this:

It warped like CRAZY. I guess the top dried first and then the foam still wanted to expand so it went downwards and the paper didn't resist. I looked at that, and just thought, no. I don't have the skills, tools or patience to try and straighten that mess out. I went to Walmart and bought a plastic prop sword and figured I'd just use it as a base and overhaul it like I did for my Captain Hook hook.

Look at that sweet wolf head, man. That I'm going to completely remove. It was a child's toy, so too small for me, but that's just fine. I traced it on some EVA foam, and drew the outline of Xena's sword around that with the pattern I had made, I had to widen it a bit since this toy sword blade is a little wider than Xena's, but no big deal. I glued the foam to the edges with contact cement. Weirdly enough the edge of the blade was the same thickness as the foam. I planned to dremel down the edges to give it an actual sharp edge.

I think this also ended up closer to 30" long, but when I did 27", it felt short. So I exaggerated it a bit. 

I then ran a line of hot glue down the middle of the front and back to raise the center a bit so it could taper more to the edges, and then filled it in with Kwikseal bathroom and kitchen sealant, carefully smoothed down gradually to the edges on both sides. I cut off the wolf head and replaced it with a ball of thermoplastic beads carefully shaped into an oblong ball that I glued to the bottom. I don't feel the glue is super secure, despite it being e6000, but I plan to cover everything in Worbla to blend it all together, so that will hold it on. I think I'm gonna add some foam bits to the hilt before that though just to make the shape more accurate.

The chakram foam I had sprayed on posterboard and wasn't warped as badly, so I figured I could work with it. I started carving and it was going sort of okay, but there were some huuuuuuuuge bubbles in the foam. I started hot gluing discarded chunks of foam in the bubbles to get a more solid piece, but it was still really uneven. I started looking at covering everything in a layer of thin craft foam but it was still so bumpy and really, thicker than I wanted.

Uhhg. It's so ugly. 

I was about to try cutting it thinner, when I realized the thickness I wanted was about the same thickness of the floor tile EVA foam I'd been working with. So... I could... you know.... just cut a circle out of that.... and call it good.  And it would already be flat and everything. 

I felt so dumb. In the end I wasted an entire can of expanding foam. Not like it's expensive, it's just annoying. 

I cut some awkward triangle shaped strips that I glued around the edge with more contact cement just to give myself some vaguely pointed extra material to work with so I could sharpen it with my dremel as well. I did that and then ran more Kwikseal around the edge to smooth out the unevenness in places where the foam didn't match up well.

So, I mentioned I had bought some hardware and beads and things for this costume. About this time I decided I should pull that stuff out and keep all my costume supplies together. You might also remember I mentioned we moved over the summer.

Now, before we moved, we lived in a pretty big house with roommates, and there was an otherwise unused front room where I kept my massive bookshelves and all my crafting supplies. It was basically my workroom. I had an extra bookshelf with a bunch of baskets for organizing my various crafts, and one was dedicated for all the stuff I had bought for Xena and wanted to keep track of since it was going to be months until I made it.

And then we moved. To a small apartment where my workspace is a corner of the living room and my craft supplies are shoved into two small bookshelves in the laundry room. And my Xena hardware and beads were just... gone. I swear, I tore the apartment apart looking for that stuff. I spent hours looking everywhere, digging up hard to get to storage boxes just to rifle through them, going through my craft supplies over and over again. Nothing. My darling boyfriend could see I was distressed by the loss, both because of my own carelessness at somehow not putting this stuff in a safe place and the expense of replacing it, so he offered to rebuy the hardware kit for me. Isn't he great?

The hardware kit is here, by the way:

https://www.toddscostumes.com/costumes/xena-warrior-princess-costumes/xena-costume/xena-dress-hardware-kit/

Most of the hardware you need for the dress. I still need some stuff for the armor, but I already had a lot of what I needed, because I just collect stuff, and was able to order whatever else. I rebought the beads myself, they weren't as expensive. I needed abalone shell beads for the decorations on the sword and the chakram. It ended up not being the worst thing ever to rebuy, I had come to realize the sword had much larger shells on it. I'd have just dealt with it with the ones I bought before, but buying more meant I could throw some bigger ones in there. So not so bad. But I am still annoyed with myself for completely losing something so important. So careless.

The shell beads are here by the way:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Natural-Abalone-Shell-Gemstone-Beads-15-5-Oval-Square-Coin-Oblong-Etc/372091050451?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&var=640978824390&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649

So I've mostly been working on getting things cut out and ready to go. I cut out a waistband for the skirt, just measuring around my hips where I wanted the skirt to sit, and three inches wide, gradually widening to 4 at the middle, because Xena's skirt looks to have that kind of extra length in the front to me. I plan to use grommets and lacing to close the back, with some black booty shorts underneath.

I also cut out 13 big wide strips for the bottom layer of the skirt, about 15 inches long and 3 inches wide. (Protip: If you're making this yourself, the width of the strip with vary depending on your hips measurement. Just divide that measurement by 13.) Now, 15 inches is almost knee length on me, so I may shorten it. We'll see. I wouldn't want the skirt to get in the way while fighting, after all.

 

 I wanted each strip of petal thingies to be 11 pieces long, and I plan to allow 1.25" between the end of one petal to the end of the next petal. I have made myself a small square of wrapped up tape that is exactly that length, it was a trick I came up with when arranging the gold trim on my Captain Hook coat, having a small square of tape that was exactly the width I wanted between each piece of trim was way easier to maneuver than using a ruler or a tape measure.

I traced and cut out 146 small petals using the pattern from the instructable, which was no small feat, let me tell you what. And yes, I know that 13 strips of 11 means I need 143 petals, but I had just enough space on the strips of fabric I had cut for the petals to do three extras, and it seemed like a good idea, just in case I fuck something up.

Now about this time I was really getting bothered by the grey fabric back of the pleather I was using. For some reason, I was just haunted by how ugly it would look when I'm wearing it and moving around and the flaps of the skirt flipping over and showing that grey. It would be so out of place and clashy! And I realize I'm the only crazy bitch that would care about this! But it's my costume, I'll do what I want. And what I want is to spend several hours painting the back of all these pieces black. All thirteen strips and 146 petals. Technically 14 strips, because I was cutting them out 2 at a time on folded fabric and didn't see any reason to go to the effort of unfolding fabric, it wouldn't hurt to have an extra, for the same reason I cut out the extra petals. 

But look at the difference! I know there's no comparison for the petals, but look at the strips! The black looks so much better than the grey. 

I vaguely considered lining the strips and attaching the petals to a strip of black felt or something, but I didn't have any felt and didn't want to go buy anything else, this costume has cost me way more than it should have at this point considering how much I'd already bought for it. And I already had a bottle of black fabric paint, plus the textile medium I'd bought for Princess Peach and the gold paint details- I didn't have to worry about the issues I had with Peach's gold details, since I was painting the back of pleather. 

I've had some drama with the metal studs that go all over Xena's costume in various places. I found some that were the right color and size but dome shaped. I tried to convince myself that would be fine, but I just.... couldn't.... do it. It wasn't right. Xena's studs are flat. And I wanted the nailhead style with prongs, rather than traditional rivets, because I have to put a lot of these in this costume and rivets require hammering and I live in an upstairs apartment with asshole ceiling pounding downstairs neighbors. Now, because they're assholes, I don't go out of my way to be quiet, but I do try not to be a dick back, in case they ever want to complain about my noise. I don't want to give them a real solid complaint. Like hammering things on the floor. So when it comes time to hammer in grommets, I will go to Sarah's or Cari's or something and hang out there and do my hammering. But there are just... so many rivets in this costume. I need to be able to work on it at home, especially since my main crafting time is late at night while finishing my workday after Stu goes to bed. So I need to be able to quietly bend prongs. I also knew what size I wanted, I wanted something about 8mm, that was what size the dot was on the pattern for the petals I had printed out from the instructable.

And, apparently, 8 mm, flat, round, antique gold/bronze pronged nailhead studs just. Don't. Exist. I spent ALL DAY looking for them. In the end, the best I could do was everything right but the size, but I could find 9mm. And really, one millimeter is almost nothing. And my petals have ended up slightly larger than the pattern anyways. So it's fine. It's fine. IT'S FINE. 

God, I'm so crazy. 

The studs I got are here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/PRONG-NAIL-HEAD-RIVETS-ALL-METAL-MANY-COLOR-SHAPE-SIZE-TO-CHOOSE-FROM-SHIP-USA/122001349788?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&var=421002752634&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649

I have also spent a not insignificant amount of time making some patterns for things that the instructable didn't have. Luckily, some time ago I bought all of Xena on DVD so in the evenings I just put that on and craft away.

So first of all, I needed a pattern for the knee guards. You might notice, the instructable
 doesn't include a pattern for those. So I just had to sort of figure it out. I guessed roughly how long they were from point to top and cut out a piece of paper and covered it with duct tape, rounded the top edge and brought the bottom to a point. I did it all as one piece, but I believe I'll separate them when I actually make them. 

The picture of my pattern isn't very good, I have two circles, and three small curvy spiky things that are approximately the right shape to be arranged around the circles for both the top and bottom half. I don't really have any process info for you here, I really just freehanded it and trimmed the pieces of tape covered paper until they looked right. Technically my pattern isn't finished, I need to actually arrange and trace the design pieces so I know where everything is going to be placed, maybe I'll do that tonight once I'm done blogging. Also, I don't think it needs that strip down the middle, I think that's just where the row of zigzaggy rivets go. I think I'm going to use elastic on the back of this. I'd like to use grommets and lacing, but I don't think that will stay up, and will be really uncomfortable on the back of my knee. I think I'd like some kind of attachment to the boots as well to prevent slipping, but I haven't figured out that part yet.

So, I no longer have easy access to a scanner or anything to digitize this pattern and add it to the collection, so if you're making this costume and want the pattern, leave a comment. I'm not going to bother going to the effort to make a digital pattern just for display purposes, but if someone needs it for actual use, let me know.

So, a natural followup to the knee guards, the boots!  I did manage to keep track of the boots I bought way back in February, somehow. That and the pleather fabric are the only things I didn't lose.

They used to have a buckle and strap across the top, but I've already removed that. And put it in a safe place. Those buckles might be useful when adding straps to attach my armor.  I knew I was going to make boot covers to make them look like Xena's, and to add lacing up the front, so I took the basic duct tape pattern tactic.

I didn't even make a mockup. I was feeling lazy and boots are a pretty simple shape. I'll sew these together, glue them to the boots, along with an extra strip up the middle front for the lacing to go across, and add some rivets and lacing in the back for accuracy. And yes, I realize I'm going to seal the zippers on the sides of the boots shut, and yes I already tested to make sure I could slip them on without unzipping them, so I don't need the zippers. 

Like that.

And of course I plan to spend a thousand years painting and weathering everything so it looks like it actually belonged to a warrior princess. I actually bought baby's first airbrush and plan to learn to use it for exactly that purpose.

I had more pattern work, of course. I spent a not small amount of time cutting out all the details on the patterns with an xacto knife. And I came to realize I'd been thinking about the armband pattern wrong. I've also realized that either Lucy Lawless has some hella thick wrists, or thin upper forearms. Probably thick wrists, all that sword fighting, you know. Anyways, the pattern for the wristband is very straight and my wrists just taper too much. I originally tried to print it as a narrow long image to just go across the top of the forearms, but I hated how that warped the designs. So I resized it, and came up with a much better shape that wraps around my arm more. I still had to pull the bottom edges more, which I just did with the distort tool on pixlr.com, but it's way better now.

Left is the first version, right is the new better version.

Next, I needed to work on the cup pattern, general shape and all the embellishments. That was... not so easy.

The cup I had cut out from my duct tape pattern ended up being weirdly flat, when I really wanted a more spherical shape.

Yes, I KNOW boobs aren't spherical, but it's armor. It's not perfect. Back when I was buying supplies for this costume, I had bought a foam ball to shape my breastplate around, so I actually ended up making a painter's tape model of the foam ball, and then trimming and adjusting it until it ended up as a rounded cup shape that was somewhat right for my bust. Then using many images of Xena's armor, I roughly sketched out the decorations on the cup, taped them to the cup and traced them, peeled the tape off and cut it out to make a pattern for them.

That's what the blue and green things are. 

The last thing I had to do is an extra piece on the breastplate. On the side of the breastplate there is a little curly bit off the sides that attaches to the straps that hold the armor on.

You can see it there.

Again, I just freehanded it. Again, and again, and again.

That's how many times I redid it. The last one on the left is the final. And it's still not as perfect as it could be, but it's very close and I like the shape. So I'm done redoing it. 

So, ummmm. I think that's all I've done so far. I still have many, many things to do. I'm making Amanda's Gabrielle costume as well, but that should be easy, it's just a crop top, skirt, boots and a staff. I already bought a length of PVC pipe I'm going to paint and decorate, and I got almost perfect fabric from the thrift store, I just need to get her to come over so I can make some duct tape patterns. Should be easy. 

Should be.