Toys!

The second week of April was spent planning, building and finishing of the Gabby stick. I had acquired a 1.25" diameter length of dowl - the closest the local timber mill offered to any of the widths suggested online - and got some very curious looks taking it on the bus!

The reference I was using for the build was Jim Yuen's "GabWhackers: A Comparison" which features dimensions for three different replica staffs - the Creation Official, WarriorNutCase, and Soundwarrior. The table of dimensions and colours would ultimately prove invaluable, but would inevitably be deviated from as I tried to adjust my custom staff to my own height.

For the wraps and grips, I purchased some cheap leather offcuts, cream garden twine, some purple and black cotton with a tribal print, and in the absence of anyone selling fake fur in anything smaller than a meter, a white anorak trim which would have to be unpicked and flattened to be wrapped around the neck of the staff.

One thing worthy of note with regards to the soft materials is that the design of the staff varies throughout the show. Gabrielle's early staff appears to feature a fluffier fur and darker leather, while series 2 and onwards veers towards tan with a flat creamy-yellow goat hide or similar instead of the fur. I may very well create a second staff for my series 2/3 costumes and follow this design, as well as attempting to get a custom print cotton to match the fabric wrap, which, as Jim points out, is the same material as the prayer scarf she finds in the market in 'Blind Faith'. So far this is the only photo reference I have of this material so if anyone has any higher quality shots or scans of the fabric, do please let me know as GabbyStick mkII shall have the exact material if it kills me!

The first step was trimming and shaping the dowl. I decided because of my height I wanted to make my staff relative to the extra four inches I have on Renee. She's 5'4" and I'm 5'8" - so if we assume the 64.5" official staff is accurate (we're assuming a lot here but this is all I have to go on) I can work out a suitable length using simple ratios. For anyone who doesn't remember GCSE mathematics, or perhaps never did ratios, here's how this works:

5'4"  = 64", so that's basically a ratio of 1:1 (one inch of staff to every one inch of actor) plus half an inch. So if I make mine 68.5" then that's going to be as near as.

Or alternatively:



  64.5
 /64
  =1.0078125
x68
=68.53125

Class dismissed. Remember to bring your homework.

Boring part done, let's say 68.5 and call it a day. So we lopped the excess off with a saw. Next I had to flatten down the smooth curves sides of the dowl with an electric sander. I wasn't going to aim for the octagonal shape of the official staff, as this would have reduced the diameter by too much and been quite difficult for someone like me who has no real woodworking experience. I just wanted to give it a raw, uneven finish so it looks hand carved and a little bit "rough and ready".

The easiest and quickest technique for this was to grip the dowl in a Workmate and run an electric sander up and down to shave off the smoothness. This was done in about 20-30 minutes with minimum sweat and a lot of sawdust. The end result, as you can see, a not-quite octagonal look but certainly a dowl with flatter sides as if hand shaved.

I left the surface as it is without further hand-sanding, as the rougher finish will show up better under a coat of woodstain.

"You can do it if you B&Q it!"

For colour, I wanted an oak woodstain with a matte finish. There are no glossy varnishes in ancient Greece after all! I used a nice cheap B&Q own-brand wood stainer, partly because I am a tightwad and partly because I don't really want a professional-looking even finish - I wanted a finish that looks liked Gabby rubbed it down with some oil while sitting by the fire in a wood somewhere. It only came in satin, but with the rough unfinished wood surface it wouldn't show up with too much of a shine, and at half price it was only £2.58 for a 250ml tin! Perfect for my little stick!

In order to prevent getting stain on my fingers - or fingerprints on my stain - I hung the staff from the washing line using a nail and a bit of wire. I hammered a nail into one end of the staff, bent it with pliers to a 90 degree angle, twisted a loop of wire over the washing line and hung the staff from it. This meant I could paint the stain onto the wood without ever having to touch the tacky surface.

It was at this point with the stain going on that I was suddenly able to see the areas which I had missed with the sander - long strips of smoother, treated wood where the stain did not take to quite such a deep colour. This wasn't a bad thing though. The varied, uneven effect on the colour gave a natural finish, highlighting different faces of the wood to enhance the hand-carved look I wanted to create. Many of these little areas were fine lines in between the sanded faces of the staff, giving a nice effect.

Once the stain was dry, the wrapping could be applied. Jim's measurements for the different staffs differ greatly but I decided to use the official staff as my basic guide. As this was intended to be a series 1 staff, I noted that the biggest difference aside from the colours and the fluffier fur was that the leather pieces were bigger. As such, the easiest way to extend the dimensions of the Creation staff to fit mine was to simply make all those leather pieces 3 inches instead of 2. I also wanted to even out the grips so the staff was symmetrical, and so (ignoring the .25 on the upper grip as this isn't even included in the total) I evened the two grips out to 4.75 inches each.

I applied the fabric first, using PVA glue on the majority then super-glue to secure the edges, then measured to find the centre point. 4.5 inches either side of this I marked the beginning of the grips, then 4.75 further still marked the leather.

I cut the leather into 3" strips and applied them also with PVA and a little super-glue. I could now start applying the twine. The spiral binding requires TWO pieces going in opposite directions so I cut two long pieces of twine, secured each at the end near the leather and began to wrap. With each circuit around the wood I secured the twine with a spot of superglue. Once the required 4.75 inches was covered, I began the spiral wrap. Here the twine was also secured at the points where it met and overlapped the twine going the other way, and once I reached the grip at the other end I trimmed and tucked the end into the corner where grip meets spiral, and secured with a a little glue, as shown here.

Anorak trim comes pre-prepared with cotton tape carefully
designed for application onto anoraks. Needs to be carefully
removed for application onto anything else.

The fur and leather at the top is far simpler. Again I cut two strips of leather 3" long and, leaving a 2.5" gap at the top, secured them to the wood with PVA leaving a 3" gap in between. I wanted to make sure the fur was the last piece to be applied so as to avoid getting glue on it, as this would be the part which would show up the most if I did! Being an anorak trim, I had to unpick and remove the cotton tape from the back, leaving a strip of backed fur about 1" wide. In order to create a smooth top and bottom edge to the fur section, I had to trim this strip to a point at the end. Word of note: when trimming fur, be sure to push the pile AWAY from where you are cutting, otherwise you may end up with dodgy looking short, blunt fur near the trimmed edge. I wanted to avoid messy splodges of PVA when it came to the fur, so the whole thing was applied with little dots of super-glue and carefully held down in tiny stages. In the end I glued the fur in about ten separate points, making sure each one was secure before moving on and glueing the next bit.

Grubbification!

Once the textiles were secure I could set about weathering them - also known as "making it look like it's been dragged through the mud a bit". For this I mixed a couple of shades of brown acrylic and watered them down so I could put a muddy brown wash over the twine, giving it darker patches. I also used a weathering spray in a dirty grey-brown to dull the brilliant white of the fur in places, and sandpapered the leather in spots to make it look scuffed and battle worn.

The finished staff looks pretty close to the series 1 version, as well as having a nice authentic "homemade" look. More photos to follow when I take both my finished costume and hittin' stick out into the woods for a photo shoot! In the meantime though, here's some shots of the staff. I'm pretty proud of this one - but as always I know what I can do to make it better!

GMFR Fundraiser

Just a quick post: not long now til the 10K and I've done a donation page. I'm on about 6.5K a day right now 3 days a week so way ahead of schedule. All donations for the charity run are gratefully received:

My Just Giving Page

Peace out xx

The peasant skirt - "oh bugger it!"

This just goes to show that occasionally you just need to stop trying to find something perfect and just have a go and see what you can come up with using whatever you've got!!

The search for peasant skirt fabric had proven fruitless for some time. It seems to be a bizarre kind of browny-burgundy colour (in linen, naturally) and changes depending on when you look at it.

I had already bought some linen which I found on special offer online but deemed it too pale and had subsequently set it to one side as potential series 3/4 skirt fabric. It is fairly noticeable that the skirt in those seasons looks quite a bit paler than in previous ones, so I had hoped it may yet prove useful. However, blessed as I am with online friends who possess genuine articles of screen used Gabby clothing, I decided it was best to be sure. A small sample was shipped off to the States to be compared to a costume belonging to a kindly member of the Xena Online Community forum. The photographs which appeared a week later sadly showed a marked difference:

The comparison game.

The other problem, my contact tells me, is that the original skirt is a far heavier linen than mine, so even though in certain lights the colours appeared quite close, the lighter weave of my purchased linen made it far less bold when the light hit it. This presented a big problem - not only will the colour look 'off' in photographs, it also means the skirt won't hang or flow right, which poses a problem, especially as by series 3 Gabby is quite the dynamic character and I want to be able to do a spot of stage fighting. So this brown linen was put into storage.

It wasn't until I began to realise how much dyeing would be involved in this project that I realised it still had potential. A glance at the peasant skirt in this photo by Phil Aldridge shows us just how thin the material is:

The bottom of the skirt is practically see through! So I figured that this was probably the thinnest of all Gabrielle's skirts. Combined with this image, there is also the length and the fact that the entire skirt is double-layered, so it's still going to have a fair bit of weight to it and hang quite nicely even if it is a bit on the flimsy side. So I decided, "sod it!" I would make the peasant skirt out of this stuff, throw a bit of red dye on it and see how it came out, and if I didn't like it, well it wasn't like it was fabric that's likely to get used on anything else any time soon. So, while in the process of dyeing the crossover skirt linen an attractive shade of "Rosewood Red", I threw in the peasant skirt.

The next thing was trying to decide on a pattern. Now there was the skirt pattern that came with the same gypsy costume I had used for the blouse, but the skirt for that looked far too full and poofy, even if it did come ready tailored to have two layers - like Gabrielle's. Furthermore, due to it's fullness it says it needs a ridiculous amount of material per layer and I had nothing like the amount recommended.

A quick glance at some choice shots of Gabrielle in the show give a vague clue as to how big the skirt really is. Fortunately even in these early episodes there are scenes where Gab is fairly dynamic and we can see the shape and motion of the skirt as she moves around. In this shot from 'The Reckoning', for instance:

Here we see Gab is standing astride the murder scene examining footprints. Her feet are just over shoulder width apart and the skirt hangs almost perfectly smoothly, covering her feet. There are also no visible seams in this or any other shot from the front. This shows the skirt to be a simple A-line shape, flared from the waist, most likely with only seams at the side and maybe a centre back seam. There is also noticeable in other shots a drawstring hanging from the back of the skirt showing how it is fastened.

This is a simple enough design, so I simply patterned 4 panels (front and back, shorter layer and longer layer) based simply on my own hip measurement - not waist, gotta get the thing on, remember! - for the top edge, flaring to the full width of the fabric. I cut the front panels on folds and the back panels at the edge - so it looks like this skirt's gonna have a centre back seam after all!

There's a reason I don't do graphics...

I put both layers together, then joined them at the waist. I then added a waistband, folding it over on the outside so that the drawstring will trail as it does in the show. The hem of both the longer and shorter layers is left raw and allowed to fray to give that weathered, well-travelled look.

Ancient-style clothing: distressing is your friend.

"It looks like something dyed in there!"

So following "The Quest For the Crossover Crinkle" there came the "Dyeing of the Crossover Crinkle". Or as I like to call it, "Making the Garage Resemble an Abattoir".

The pink crinkle cotton and the burnt orange linen needed to be dyed a rusty brown, so brown dye with differing levels of reddy tones had been purchased. I had also bought myself a large plastic tub approximately the size of a small bathtub. This was actually designed for mixing plaster and was bought from a builders' supply yard! I would recommend a similar setup for anyone wishing to hand-dye material. A larger surface area always yields better results and having previously done most of my dyeing in the kitchen sink I can say the difference is noticeable.

So at the point we started at, we had two very different shades of material, shown here with flash (left) and without (right):

As I explained in the earlier post, my first step was to try and get them closer by dyeing the pink cotton terracotta and the orange linen rosewood red.

Dyeing fabric in the plaster tub was a larger scale job than my previous experiences of dyeing a tshirt or pair of shorts in the sink. For a start it can't be filled from the tap so I filled it with the necessary 6 litres of 40 degree water by filling it with two kettle loads of boiled water and two of cold tap water. Then the dye goes in, dissolved in a jug of warm water, plus a small bucket load of salt (which completely eradicated our supply and resulted in some pretty bland cooking until the next grocery shop.) Of course I also took it upon myself to spill a portion of red dye on the garage floor so when the gardeners passed through the next day they must have been convinced we were slaughtering livestock in there.

The overall result of the larger dyeing receptacle is a shallower body of water with large surface area, so the fabric can spread out and dye more evenly. I did have to fold the fabric over on itself a few times but was sure to unfold, re-fold, and rearrange the material on the surface of the water as many times as was practical so as to get the most even result.

I also threw the peasant skirt in with the rosewood for half an hour to give it a warmer tone.

The end result has evened the fabrics out considerably here shown with flash (left) and without (right):

The difference shows up a lot more with the flash on, but as this was at close quarters I decided to take another photo with the flash from a greater distance to see how it might photograph indoors at a convention or similar:

The overall effect isn't bad but the colours I think need to be browner and a little less rich. In natural light they still show up very... well, orange. The next phase will be, I think, to over-dye with a darker brown to calm them down a bit, and quite possibly get them a shade closer. I know a perfect match will be impossible but let's see what we can get with a little perseverance and another bath full of salt and chemicals!

An Ebay Update Courtesy of Xena Prop Treasures

 Fellow blogger Secret Kabeiros very kindly keeps us all informed on Xena goodies on Ebay and has shared some truly unique auctions - costume patterns and design notes from series 5 and 6. Some truly awesome and fascinating bits of production memorabilia for costume geeks like me. Check out the blog entry and links here:

Xena Prop Treasures: Heads-up! Production pieces on eBay

The Many Garbs of Gab

It's been a stressful few weeks so in the absence of much progress I thought I'd share a little costume study for series 1.

I've already discussed the different styles of peasant shirt worn by Gabrielle in season 1, but I thought I'd do a quick episodic breakdown of the different outfits throughout the season. This first season exhibits the most costume changes for a main character, possibly because of the fairly fast evolution of Gabrielle from peasant to Amazon trainee to burgeoning warrior, and they had to incorporate those changes into her wardrobe for practical and aesthetic reasons.

The peasant dress is ditched for the shorter crossover top and matching skirt halfway through, as it would be fairly tricky for Gab to fight in a full length dress. There is, however, a prototype crossover outfit which appears only once in "Death in Chains", featuring a wider blue stripe than the standard variant, a red leather belt, and, bizarrely, the Amazonian skirt and necklace bequeathed to Gabrielle by Terreis in the subsequent episode, "Hooves and Harlots". I imagine these episodes were originally filmed with the intention of airing the other way around, but something caused "H&H" to be pushed back. Continuity issues aside, I am not particularly fond of the alternate crossover outfit. I find it a little too fussy, with the belt and the necklace overpowering the overall look, and the wider blue stripes a little clumsy on Renee's 5'4" frame. I can see why they decided to change it. Nonetheless, it's nice to see the Amazon necklace making another appearance, albeit a little out of synch with Gabrielle's initiation into the Amazons!

1. "Sins of the Past" - Peasant dress, long sleeves.
2. "Chariots of War" - Peasant dress, long sleeves, w/jacket.
3. "Dreamworker" - Peasant dress, long sleeves. 
4. "Cradle of Hope" - Peasant dress, green, short sleeves.
5. "Path Not Taken" - Peasant dress, green, short sleeves.
6. "Reckoning" - Peasant dress, blue, short sleeves w/ jacket.
7. "Titans" - Peasant dress, green, short sleeves.
8. "Prometheus" - Peasant dress, blue, short sleeves w/ jacket.
9. "Death in Chains" -  Alternative crossover top, Amazon skirt and necklace.
10. "Hooves & Harlots" - Peasant dress, blue, short sleeves w/ jacket, Amazon Princess kit.
11. -  24. "Black Wolf" onwards - crossover top and wrap skirt.