The Crossover Set Photoshoot

Following on from Saturday's XenaFest, my photographer CT and I ventured out into the wilderness of my local nature reserve to snap some shots of the crossover set. It was a challenging shoot, with the summer sun high in the sky (and right in my eyes) and in 25 degree heat (which for pasty British people like us is practically unbearable).

However, as CT is now working full time, finding the time to get together to do shoots is tough, so with the light barely passable and the heat bearing down upon us, off we went!

Click for more photos! Let Gab lead the way!

It was a tough shoot, with difficult light and awkward scenery. We had a selection of photos we were trying to replicate, and by the time CT was done filtering out the better ones we found that some hadn't worked and there were really only a handful. We will probably redo the shoot again when we have more time.

Costume wise I am still not quite happy with the colours of the top and skirt which, as you can see, do not quite seem to match yet. I may see if I can maybe take the skirt a little darker and redder to match the top - to save having to take the ribbons off the top - but matching up two very different materials that started life in two totally different shades is nigh on impossible.

But my favourite shot from the entire shoot is probably this one, recreated from a publicity shot of Renee from season one, with the light behind her.

I'm looking the wrong way but the light is spot on and it shows up the detail on the top beautifully!

For the rest of the shoot check out my DA page here:

Gabrielle's Gallery

And for CT's shoot report (along with other Xena-related posts, crafts, waffles etc) go here:

Joxer Of All Trades

Do please add us, email us, leave feedback, etc. We'd love to hear from fellow Xenites. Hopefully there will be more photographs soon when we get the chance - and some better light.

Return to XenaFest

People talk about their "first convention" as if there was one massively defining event which they attended and suddenly became a con-goer. For me there were several. The one which I think of as my first con was a 'Buffy' event down in London when I was 17. This was the event where I met several of my convention friends, my first boyfriend (and my second and third boyfriends, actually) and was actually attending without parental supervision.

Before that I had been taken to the SFX weekender in Blackpool, with my dad taking care of me, and several years before that I had gone to Starfury's 'Chariots of War' convention in Heathrow, a 'Xena' convention held in a hotel which I would later come to know, love and get drunk in many years later.

My first convention. One of many.

But shortly prior to 'COW', my 13 year old self had gone, with my Mum and Dad, to a small, local 'Xena' event in a town hall in Coleshill.

This was 'XenaFest'.

I turned up, in my Callisto t-shirt which had been bought specially for the day, and which I am now wearing as I write this almost 17 years later, and spent the day begging my parents for merchandise and watching a selection of 8 episodes from series 4 which had been sent over on video from the States. This was of course back in the day when there were no internet downloads, and the wait between the US airdates and the UK could be up to a year, and that was if you had satellite. We were a terrestrial only household and as such had not even seen series 3 yet. Fortunately some other fans were able to fill me in on the essential back story for the series 4 opening (why is Gabrielle dead, and who is this "Hope" person they keep banging on about?) so I could sit back and enjoy the weirdness that was 'Adventures in the Sin Trade'. I remember revelling in the ridiculousness of 'In Sickness and in Hell' and being awestruck by 'Devi'. And most of all I remember how amazing it was to spend a day with other fans.

It was a wonderful day out for a young Xenite, but as 17 years had passed I had not held out much hope that they would still be going. So imagine my surprise when I learned that I had just missed one back in January!

It felt like a long wait until July, but it gave me time to get my crossover kit, bag and staff completed. Summer XenaFest fell on July 19th, and I turned up nice and early, all on my lonesome, in full costume without knowing a soul.

For a hardened conventioner, I was nervous as hell. I was used to knowing half the attendees, most of the staff, the organiser, the DJ and the venue like the back of my hand, but I was shaking with nerves at the prospect of walking into an unknown building full of unknown people. What if I was in the wrong place? What if I was the only one in costume? What if everyone else knew each other and nobody spoke to me?

But it has to be said that the Xena crowd were an immensely welcoming bunch and before long I was sat at a table being given glasses of wine and chocolates and trying to work out complex anagrams of Xena quotes for the quiz. (Incidentally, I am very aware that I owe some of my fellow quiz team members drinks, so do please come and collect at the next one as I will be bringing a small vineyard with me in order to make up by debt!) It was a wonderfully jovial and laid back afternoon, and as the evening drew on I was introduced to Anna and Andy and their teenage son, who had all come along dressed as Xena, Ares and Solan. Anna also had large quantities of wine with her, and was so delighted to have acquired a Gabrielle all of her own that I was presented with yet more alcohol.

Take me with you! Teach me everything you know!

As well as being more than a little tipsy, the vino had clearly lubricated my wallet and so by the time the charity auction came about I was more than willing to donate £45 for a stack of autographs. It was all for a good cause though, and it'll save me some pennies come convention season!

It was a truly wonderful experience, and I cannot say enough of a thank-you to the organisers and the fans who have kept the event going for so many years, and who made it such a welcoming event to attend. I'm counting down until the next one!

In The Bag!

So while Captain Transvestite was gamely stitching my ribbons, I focussed my attentions on accessories.

One of the problems with cosplaying is having somewhere to store your wallet/keys/phone etc. If your costume has no pockets you are often left lugging a bag around with you which does not match your costume one little bit. You find yourself constantly rushing to put your bag down out of shot for photographs. Fortunately, Gabrielle shall not have this problem!

The bag appears in several episodes throughout a few seasons, and looks to be made of brown suede with braided leather strap and trimmings, dark brown leather thonging around the edges, and wooden beads. I ordered some scraps of suede for £3, and an entire sofa's worth of scrap leather - seriously, somebody had a sofa reupholstered and stuck all the leather from the old covers on eBay so I now have enough tan leather to make everything in the world!! - and a bit of thonging and some beads and I was ready to go!

The basic shape was easy enough but because my suede was all small pieces I had to make each side out of three bits. Fortunately the front has the fur flap and two leather braids on it, so I put the seams where the braids would be so they could be covered up.

The fur piece looks like it should be a flap to go over the top of the bag to close it, but is in fact just a decorative piece on the front panel.

I then punched holes all around the outside at 1" intervals and laced dark brown 2mm leather thonging around that, which was fiddly and time consuming but looked nice! Thonging gives the illusion that the bag was constructed without the aid of machinery and is in fact only held together by the thin leather twine around the edge.

The tan leather was cut into strips, stitched together at one end and braided to form the trim. This was then glued onto the front of the bag. I added 8 thin strips of suede as tassels and covered the join with a 10mm strip of suede with a brass button on.

Next I attached the beads to each of the leather "stitches". I had bought beads in two colours - pale wood and dark wood. It was quite time consuming threading five beads in order onto the cotton, looping the end around the leather, then threading the cotton back through four of the five beads and tying it in a square knot around the end one. I sealed the knot with a tiny dot of superglue as one of the first few I did came undone the first time I moved the bag so I realised I had to make them more secure.

Finally I attached the strap. The strap was braided leather just like the pieces on the front, so I made another two and glued them together for length, covering the join with a bit of leather. The ends are supposed to be on the outside but with a machine that was struggling to get through the sheer amount of leather and suede involved, I had to improvise and tucked them inside.

The overall effect, while inaccurate in places, is pretty awesome. I'm quite pleased with this and now Gabrielle has somewhere to keep her smartphone.

If You Can Get the Staff...

Following my adventure in prop building I have become rather fond of the simple but effective process of making the Gabwhacker and decided that my new series 1 costume deserved a series 1 specific staff.

A fellow blogger, author of Xena Prop Treasures, had sent me some reference photos of Gabrielle's first standard issue fighting staff (no not the Amazon one with the bird on it, although I may do that one when/if I make the Amazon Princess costume).

The series 1 staff differs slightly in colour and materials. The wood, twine and leather are darker and the middle section with the overlapping spiral whipping appears to be a mottled bronze colour with a metallic shine. In terms of construction this middle section is also shorter, with longer grips, and the leather sections are in between the two, as opposed to at the ends.

I wanted this staff to be suitable for use and so rather than choosing the dimension to match the one on screen, I veered towards a thinner wooden dowel which would move faster and be easier to handle. And I happened to already have one of these - my ORIGINAL Gabrielle staff which I made when I was 13.

I had often planned to recycle this as scroll materials so it would eventually see use as a Gabby prop, but this seemed more fitting. I stripped away the old wrappings and started work on it again.

The staff is already painted a darker brown than my newer one, so I left the colour alone and applied new trimmings. I started in the middle with the fabric, then added the twine. In the interests of making the staff easier to use for fighting and display, I deviated from the original and centered the twine grips at distances of 1/3 along the length of the staff. These are the points where one is supposed to grip a staff, so having the twine in the right place to grip will give my a sensory indication of whether I am holding the staff correctly.

To keep the middle section shorter, I made the grips 11" long and the centre section 8". I left a 1" gap between each section to be covered with a 2" strip of black leather to hide the gap. The middle section still looks too long, but this is partly down to the narrower dimensions of the wood and the fact that I wanted to keep the grips in a suitable grippy-place.

I then painted the twine a darker brown, matching the on-screen colour as best I could and giving it a grimy, weathered look. I also painted the centre section, using a combination of black and cream paint in dry brush strokes, then over spraying it with gold spray paint to soften the strokes and give in that metallic sheen.

The fur section on the end was wrapped and secured with superglue, and discoloured a little with weathering spray like last time I then added the 2" strips of leather either side of the fur, and over the gaps between the wraps.

So I now had a staff and a costume ready to go!

Check out the photoshoot for better pics of both!

Crossover Construction

My ribbon arrived courtesy of Captain Transvestite's brother, who happened to be in town, on Wednesday. I cannot express enough how delighted I am with the embroidery! The attention to detail is amazing. Incidentally, CT now has a specifically Xena-related Tumblr account entitled 'Joxer Of All Trades' and has blogged about both the ribbon embroidery and the subsequent photoshoot of the outfit, so go check them out!

Wednesday was dedicated entirely to the production of the top - or rather the completion thereof as the basic shape had already been worked out over the week or so prior. Working without a pattern I had to come up with the shape myself. I know absolutely nothing about pattern drafting and as such worked on a basis of trial and error. I created a "toile", which is essentially a mock up of the garment out of cheap fabric upon which you can try out different positions of seams, edges, etc. I ended up making about four variants of the design out of old curtains before I found a pattern that worked. Here you can see my curtain fabric mockup with two different shapes of shoulder seam - one straight and one curved.

How very 'Sound of Music' of me.

With a basic design decided upon, I made myself a proper pattern out of newspaper, much like the did in the good old days, and finally felt confident enough to cut into the real fabric!

This was a little nerve wracking as this material has taken three lots of dye in order to get anywhere close to the right colour - and I'm still not entirely convinced by it. I may yet wind up taking all the trim off again and dipping it in some dark brown to take the brightness out.

With the basic top cut and sewn, it then hung on the wardrobe for a week or so while I waited for the ribbons to arrive. And of course they finally did and after I had stopped squealing over them and how perfect they were, I had to set about embellishing my very basic top.

As I discussed in my earlier post, the three stripes around the neckline consist of the two embroidered ribbons and a distressed blue cotton in between. I had found a pre-distressed blue cotton going cheap in my local fabric store, and thought this was pretty much perfect for the look I was aiming for.

It's actually also a possible alternative for the peasant dress jacket, when I come to give that another go, but we shall see.

I cut a curved strip, following the neckline shape as best I could, and then sewed it onto the top in one continuous piece. From what I could see there are no seams along the striped section at all so I was trying to remain true to that design. I also attached a wider strip of blue around the bottom, with the rough edge on display on the outside. These blue strips are long enough to tie into a double knot at the back to fasten the top. I also added a second layer over the top of the first so as to layer up and make it a little messy, fitting the rough and distressed look of the garment.

Next I added the ribbons - the brown machine-embroidered one around the neck and the empire line, and the navy hand-embroidered one also around the neck a little further in, allowing a gap of about an inch and a half for the blue cotton to show through.

Completed top, with trim. Skirt beneath.

The overall scale and look seemed pretty bang on!

I also remembered, just as I thought I was finished, that the sleeves also have a stripe around them, which looks like a slightly paler brown edged with the same navy frayed ribbon. So I used a scrap of the skirt fabric backed with a leftover strip of frayed denim and attached those to the edges of the sleeves.

All embellishments attached, Gab Costume the Second was ready to go! 

A sneak preview...

Today I received my completed hand-embroidered and machine-embroidered ribbon for the series 1 crossover outfit. I am so very very excited I felt the need to post a picture:

Isn't it beautiful?!! I now have three days to finish the outfit. And the bag. And possibly another staff....

The Gods are in the Details

Never one to rest on my laurels, I have launched straight into the crossover top this week, following hot on the heels of the completion of the wrap skirt. With July's Midlands XenaFest fast approaching I wanted to get the costume finished as soon as possible and hopefully be able to make the suede bag and maybe a scroll or two.

The design for the crossover top is really quite simple, but the details are complex. The stripes around the neckline and empire line of this top have all sorts of fun things going on, as shown in this close up shot, courtesy of Secret Kabeiros of Xena Prop Treasures. This is probably about as detailed a shot as I was ever going to get of the embroidery and materials on this neckline, and it has to be said recreating this is something of a forbidding task to someone not hugely adept at detailed work:

The centre stripe looks to be plain, distressed linen or cotton in a cornflower blue. I was delighted to be able to pick up some pre-distressed blue cotton for £3 a metre at the Fancy Silk Store. It's perhaps a little dark and a little flimsy but it does the job beautifully.

Next, the outer stripes, which appear to be layered over the top. These are rather odd as they both appear to have frayed the same navy blue colour but one looks to be solid navy while the other is a brown/navy mixed weave. I debated how to achieve this - layering brown linen on top of navy, bias binding, ribbon, all sorts. It wasn't under I happened to have a clear out of my fabric box that I had an epiphany.

DENIM!

I had, in the bottom of the fabric box, the offcut from a pair of navy jeans I had shortened. The dark blue front and the off-white/navy blend on the back looked just right! If I could get some denim and dye or paint the white fibres on the back the right shade of brown it would work pretty well.

Fortunately some kind soul on ebay was flogging off 0.4 of a meter of denim for £1.40, so I bought that and cut it onto strips about an inch and a half wide. I frayed the edges, and stuck them through the washing machine to soften them up. Then I took two of them and with watered down fabric paint I applied a dirty brown hue to the underside, trying to match the colour on the photograph. The end colours look pretty close:

The navy of the denim has faded slightly but I can live with that. Makes it look authentic. Now for the tricky part - the embroidery.

The embroidery on the brown looks to be a simple linear machine-embroidered pattern, while the navy is more complex, and hand embroidered. I had, some time ago, purchased a 2m strip of embroidered ribbon in what looked to be a similar pattern, and the plan was to stitch this onto the navy strip and call it "close enough" but the revelation of the patterns and colours involved, thanks to the close up shot, made me wonder if I could do better.

So a discussion was had with fellow sewing enthusiast and more specifically embroiderer, that little known superhero Captain Transvestite. Captain Transvestite is one of my best friends, a fellow Xena fan, possessor of an embroidery machine, and the best ex in the whole world. They think nothing of hand-hemming a 5m circumference poodle skirt and embellishing it with individual appliqué/embroidery/beaded mutant doggies. (They are very pretty mutant doggies. CT is a fan of John Carpenter's 'The Thing' and decided the traditional poodle skirt concept would work better if the poodles were adapted into man-eating alien-dog hybrids. And who am I to disagree with that kind of genius?)

And so, with less than two weeks to go until Birmingham Xena Fest, the denim strips, along with carefully colour matched threads for both hand embroidery and machine embroidery, have been shipped up north for CT to work some magic on.

Fingers crossed they will come back just in time for me to wallop them onto the backing before next Saturday - probably next Friday afternoon. This gives me a week or so to work on.... something else. I'm not sure yet. But there's a suede bag and some other accessories demanding my attention so let's see what the week brings?
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NB: For anybody who happens to be wondering where Captain Transvestite gets their name, look up and watch Eddie Izzard's 'Sexie' tour and have a good giggle.

It's a Wrap!

With the peasant dress jacket still on hold (I'm not happy with the stripes and trying to find some better material) I have turned my focus to the latter-half series 1 crossover top and wrap-around skirt. I have already written about sourcing fabric and dyeing said fabric for these costume pieces in my earlier entries (see links) but now things have progressed a little.

"Thank the Gods!!"

I won't bore you with yet more details of my spending an hour or so dipping material into a vats of water in various attractive shades of bodily fluid, so I'll be brief and simply say that the crinkle cotton and heavy linen were still too bright for my liking, and noticeably different, and as such the crinkle cotton for the top (which had come out a bright burgundy) had a yellow added to it to take it to more of an orange to match the cinnamon shade of the linen, and then both had a darker brown thrown at them to tone them down a little. It is difficult to say how close the result is to the original, as the lighting on screen varies enormously. But it IS around about what I was aiming for so I started on the skirt.

Both the top and skirt for this costume feature a crossover/wraparound design. And most sewing peeps know that wrap around skirts are the easiest things to do in the world, right? RIGHT?

Wrong! This one has decided to be considerably more complicated than it first looked. Mostly due to that panel at the front.

"Xena, are you SURE nobody can see up my skirt?"

This would be easy enough to do were it just one piece of fabric that goes around as far as the end of the lower layer. However, I don't believe it does. At no point do you EVER see flappy ends of front panel waving about during any of Gab's athletic scenes, nor are there any seams or joins in the outer layers that suggest the front panel attaches to the outer layer somewhere along the line. I spent a couple of episodes freezeframing the DVD trying to see any such evidence, but nothing showed up indicating that the underpanel was in anyway attached to the wrap skirt anywhere other than the waistband. I did, however, discover that Gab was wearing white pants during the filming of "The Prodigal." Furthermore, there are NO visible seams ANYWHERE on the skirt, so all the construction is hidden in the waistband and folded over in such a way that it is invisible. Figures!

So, the downside of no visible seams is that I have nothing really to go on in terms of working out the construction. However, the upside is that I kind of have artistic licence now to put it together however I want! With this in mind, I looked to the series 3/4 skirt for inspiration.

I had been sent, courtesy of a fellow Xenite in America, some beautiful shots of a screen used series 3 & 4 Gabrielle costume. One of the things that was particularly interesting about the skirt was the structure of the layers, for underneath all the flaps and wraps was a solid piece at the back with a split in it to allow the wearer to take it on and off:

I decided this would be the most sensible way to go with this skirt also, and as such came up with a design whereby the wraparound style overskirt could be one pattern piece, the A-line underskirt with the split at the waist could be another. I experimented with a circle skirt design creating a 'toille' (a mockup in cheap fabric), chopping bits off until it hung right in order to find the right shape, and then patterned the underskirt off this also so that both would have about the right amount of fullness. The shapes I came up with, both to be cut on folds, were as follows:

Overskirt

Underskirt

The centre back seam of the underskirt is then stitched up as far as the split, leaving the split open - you know, so I have room to squeeze my bum into this thing once it's finished!

The overskirt then is sewn to the underskirt at the waist, from one of the ends up until it reaches the split, carefully arranged so that correct side will be on top once it is flipped over to conceal the seam.

The remaining length of the overskirt then has a waistband but to the right size and shape to run from the far edge of the split, up to the end. This is sewn on along the top seam, and then down the far edge of the split, for about 2/3 of the way down. This waistband serves to both enable the securing and concealment of the top edge of the overskirt, as well as strengthening the waist area and provide a sturdier backing for any fastenings.

For additional reinforcment, and also following the techniques of the series 3/4 skirt, I added cotton tape around the entire length of the waistband. This will give yet more strength to the waistband especially once I have to start adding fastenings. The end of the wraparound overskirt is secured with a hook and eye to the corresponding layer beneath, along with a press-stud at the top of the split where it meets the overskirt, as well as several strips of velcro in between to make sure everything sits in the right place and stays put!

I have used my illustrations thus far because frankly the photographs I took of this part of the process really give no indication of what seam is where. The basic construction was now complete and all that remained was to trim and distress the hemline. I had been a tad too generous with the length of the skirt and so had to shorten it by a few inches, but as I had remained consistent in the distance from waist to hem throughout the patterning, this was fairly easy. I just lopped three inches off the bottom and re-cut the curves to fit.

Shortened skirt, showing my lil knees.

The fiddly part was fraying the edges, as the hem of this skirt is not merely "distressed" like that of the peasant dress. It has about half and inch of thick frayed material around the edge. To achieve this I had to sew a seam around the edge of the skirt, about half an inch in, and then pick the threads of the linen apart and trim the longer ones back in line with the short ones. Yes that's right - EVERY SINGLE ONE. It took three hours, and I have so far only done the outer skirt and the front half of the underskirt. But it looks AMAZING.

This process really frayed my nerves. Ho ho ho!

Depending on time, I expect I will also fray the back of the underskirt sooner or later, as it may be visible when I am being athletic and stuff (yeah right!). In the meantime though, I am pretty darn proud of the skirt so far. Decent photos will follow on soon, but here is a sneak preview:

All done! Proud Gabs!