This Halloween I was Xena: Warrior Princess. I loved this show when I was a kid. Xena was my heroine and making this costume was a lot of fun! I was down to the wire finishing it before Halloween.
Believe it or not this was a no sew project! It’s held together with staples, black duct tape and hope.
I’m so proud of this costume and I feel like it came out great. I delayed sharing it hoping I’d get some shots of it outside in good light but it’s already past the middle of November and the weather is not agreeing. Who knew it could still rain in California?
How about you? What’s your best Halloween costume you’ve pulled off?
Quill Alley 
So I know this is kind of an ancient post, but I’ve been thinking about how to make a diy xena costume with minimal sewing and no leatherworking required and figured duct tape might be the way to go, especially because there exists duct tape that looks like leather… so I landed here. This costume is great. How did you approach this? Is all of the “leather” duct tape, or something else? How did you construct the shoulder-thingies? and how did you do the armor? I’ve worked with duct tape on a few costumes in the past, but nothing quite on this scale.
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I used a faux leather fabric in black/brown that does not fray. I just used black Duck brand duct tape, not faux leather. Most of the duck tape is hidden on the inside of the costume. The hanging leather pieces were stapled in a way that hides the staples. The shoulder pieces are the same faux leather embellished with gold sharpie, the oil based sharpies seem to show up as a brighter gold. The chest piece is heavy gage wire armature covered in super-sculptey polymer clay. The wire helps strengthen the clay. After baking I painted it with Folk Art “Inca gold” acrylic paint. Sculpting with clay is a bit tricky when it is as thick as the armor pieces are. Have you ever worked polymer clay before?
After explaining this all, I realized there’s a lot of little details to making it right. I think I will make a video in the next few weeks explaining the hole process.
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