this is a channel largely dedicated to analyzing fights in movies but you may be interested to
know that my favorite thing to watch on youtube is currently costuming this video is sponsored
by Wondrium and it will soon become very obvious why and i saw Micarah Tewers video right before
Christmas where she made a holiday barbie dress and said that she got 'strong Christmas warrior
princess vibes' i think it might be time to commit sewing yeah there's no way i'm going to wear this
the entire time. the character that springs to mind when you say warrior princess is of course
Xena I was very up for some ancient greek vibes so i went to googling and i saw this
video of Professor Greg Aldrete and his group at the university of Wisconsin green bay they
did some experimental archaeology and figured out that it's possible to make reasonably good
armor by taking layers of linen and layering them and if you laminate them with glue then you might
be able to shoot your friend with an arrow and not hurt him please don't try that at home now
i don't have an opinion on the linothorax as part of the archaeological debate but i
do have a sneaking fondness for textile armor so i thought why not make one of those but make it more
holiday barbie so i bought some things i mean not linen i bought two cotton bed
sheets two meters of sequinned fabric 11 meters of random fabric in a box from eBay
some sparkly rhinestone things yeah those never came and a truly ridiculous amount
of PVA glue and a truly marvellous thing happened when the random fabric arrived
handy because look how shiny and silver so i moved mannequin skywalker into the living room because
it's cold outside covered her in a bin bag to protect her from future gluing
endeavors took the pattern for the corselet drafted by the experimental
archaeology people attempted to recreate it in cardboard in approximately my size
and completely messed it up [facepalm] i'm an idiot look look at this
the front is high and the back i wondered i thought this doesn't seem right like where's
the protection at the front but yeah i'm an idiot that's what the problem is this kind of
armor is supposed to be high at the front and also at the back to protect you know
your neck and your upper chest that sort of thing there isn't meant to be a cutout for the neck
there are just meant to be cutouts for the arms anyway i made the shoulder pieces out of cardboard
much more successfully and then went back and fixed the chest piece with some extra cardboard
and tape and it turned out fine for a given value of fine the linothorax prototypes put together by
the experimental archaeologists use a minimum of 10 or 11 layers of linen and they use rabbit
glue but this is fashion and so i used a lot of pva glue because fabric glue is expensive and i
didn't think that hot glue would really work for what i was trying to do. did the pva glue work?
ah sort of it has definitely made it stiffer i definitely wouldn't recommend pva glue
as the way to do this but it it has sort of done the thing i wanted possibly if i'd mixed it with
water it would have been better something to try for next time perhaps anyway if you want to make
yourself one of these you make a cardboard mock-up that's roughly in your size preferably altered as
necessary before you start and then you cut out the pattern once on your fabric i used this random
blue stuff which seemed to be made of a natural fibre maybe and then cut out the top half of the
pattern again and glued them together because i didn't want to make the pteruges just yet
more on those later and then i put those pieces back on Ani to dry because then it
would hopefully set in approximately the right shape i do recommend this if you have a mannequin
available when it was mostly dry i went and sewed it together yes the sewing machine is in the shed
because it became evident that either the glue wasn't sticking well enough or that i hadn't
used enough glue glue does prevent the fabric from unraveling at the edges even if you don't hem it
so that's a plus it does add to the stiffness and so helps with the armor-like appearance
and it does sort of attach the pieces together so partial success i mean i wouldn't trust this
as actual armor but i wouldn't trust anything i make as actual armor the shoulder pieces i made in
blue but also in this random cream fabric but you can only glue two layers together at once really
and it takes a really long time for the glue to dry so i glued and then i waited and while
i was waiting the bed sheets arrived i'm sure i ordered singles but why bed sheets well you will
note that holiday barbie is wearing a ballgown and so it was clear that we needed something
that would sort of resemble a long dress and since we were going ancient greece inspired i
figured an ionic chiton would be the perfect thing i mean i was sort of wrong about that
but i wasn't too far wrong to make a chiton take your double bed sheet fold it in half cut a hole
for your neck and don't do what i did and hem the sides together you'll see why in a minute.
the next day the glue had dried and so i could stick more things together so i did
augmenting with cardboard where necessary which worked pretty well for the shoulder
pieces but not so much for the chest pieces oh well and then i took the silver fabric covered
the entire shoulder section in it pinned it in place and sewed it on. the reason this took so
long was that now everything has to dry all over again so i decided to get back to work on the
chiton which needed a wash because i had sewed it, again, in the shed, because there aren't
any flat surfaces in my house which i could set up the sewing machine on for the several days it
was going to take to do the project and the shed is a little bit full of residual purple glitter
from a project which has never seen the light of youtube day so after i hemmed the neck and sewed
the sides of the bedsheet i then had to wash and iron it i may have included this bedsheet ironing
footage solely to prove to my mother that i do use my iron as you were a chiton, which was basically
everyday wear for the ancient greeks, consisted of one or two rectangles of cloth either pinned
belted sewn or some combination together and kind of draped on the body my belt was actually just
a moderately long piece of ribbon which was left over from my mistcloak project of 2020
but when i tried it on i have to say it did not work at all "i look like a tent!" so first
i tried a gathering stitch to sort of puff the sleeves up but it quickly became evident that
it was just the sheer amount of fabric around the body which was causing the problem and also
the fact that i'd hemmed the sides together so i trimmed the sides of the sheet until the sleeves
were sort of elbow length to reduce the amount of fabric and that did help back to the armor okay so
i think what we need is a kind of progress report my sequin fabric arrived so that's exciting um it
is shedding sequins all over my floor but never mind um i i'm reasonably happy with this part i
mean it's very starship troopers this other thing though yeah so what we're gonna do is i'm going to
get my newly shortened but not yet hemmed chiton i'm going to put everything on
and then we'll see what happens so we've got the chiton which i have not finished hemming
yet but that's not really the point the problem is here because i did add some uh i kind of
took a triangle out of this to try and give it something resembling a waist but i don't think
i don't think it worked very well good thing it wasn't actually laminated properly
otherwise i would have had to use a jigsaw yeah this just looks really weird okay this
is not looking how i would like it to so the only possible solution
is to make it more fashion let's cut some slits i think in this so that it actually has
some kind of waist and then when it does have a waist uh we can add like an extra layer of sequins
as sort of fake reinforcement but actually they're just belting it so let's see what happens
i'm actually already much happier with that we're going to need to make a separate skirt
uh but that's okay so if i make a really wide waistband and just kind of
put it around there then that means that i can make a separate
skirt thing and that will be much easier. spoiler it was not easier at all. i sewed a waist belt
type thing after rescuing my dumb cat Nemo "you're not allowed up there it is covered in pins why are
you up here?You'll get a pin in your foot you want a pin in your foot? no you do not" [thump]
and then i made a circle skirt out of the sequin fabric and i used my leather punch to make some
holes in the chest piece to thread ribbon through to cinch it closed that is almost certainly not
how they did it historically but i think it looks nice but then i tied the sequin waist belt over
the top and thought just not happy with this and i didn't really have enough of the silver
fabric to make something else so while i thought about that i used hot glue to glue the back of
the chest piece to the back of the shoulder piece and i came up with a plan i feel like
i feel like this actually doesn't look bad so if you split it again here
and here and there and just go around all of them
and then the skirt goes underneath i think that might work but i'm actually going to pin this one
okay what i'm actually going to do is bend one of my pins but never mind so with a cunning
combination of cutting sewing and hot gluing i made some probably very historically inaccurate
pteruges but oh well it looks much better now i told you we get back to the pteruges! pteruges
are technically any kind of strips at the edges of armor so you see them on shoulder sometimes but
quite often as a sort of skirt thing Xena has them but mine as you can see start right at the natural
waist which i'm i'm not sure if that's accurate at all and also i'm not sure if they're coming
down far enough because i think they're meant to protect the groin but i trimmed them without
really thinking about it because i thought i was going to make a separate skirt of pteruges to go
over the top and that was not what happened so i went out to the shed where my sewing machine
is currently set up and i sewed the bottom of all of the fake pteruges which i think
has significantly improved the look of the entire thing which means that i can put the sort of skirt
what's it underneath the terrier so i can put on the chiton and then i can put on the skirt
into which i can possibly hide a pocket and then i can put the linothorax over the top and then we
can kind of just call it good i do also have a corinthian helmet which i bought on amazon
and a blonde wig the important thing is that it no longer looks really weird or i mean it does
look weird but the right kind of weird as it was just generically strange i'm going to try
putting everything on mannequin skywalker having tried everything on mannequin skywalker i punched
some more holes i think what i need is a big button threaded the shoulder pieces hemmed
the skirt and ran a ribbon through the waist and then remembered that i had no pockets and
that was unacceptable so i cut out some blue pockets and then thought no that's a bit silly
the sequin fabric is sort of translucent and so i need something that will blend in so i
used some of the cut off chiton fabric to make a white pocket i also actually went and got my
eyelashes dyed picked up a stage combat safe spear from my friend Duncan and then i had
to contend with makeup and hair a skill i've never really acquired so let me tell you about
today's sponsor while you watch me fail at makeup application so this video is sponsored by Wondrium
because the idea to do ancient greek style holiday barbie warrior princess came because i watched a
video on youtube by professor greg aldrete of the university of wisconsin green bay and someone said
in the comments section of the youtube video that they really enjoyed watching him on Wondrium so
off i went to wander him to watch everything he'd ever been in and i started with the historian goes
to the movies series where he talked about gladiator yes i know it's roman don't @ me,
in which i learned that the emperor Claudius did not in fact murder his father or get killed by a
fictional character but was instead killed in 192 a.d on the 31st of December by being strangled in
his bath by a wrestler called Narcissus google it i am not even making that up also in that
lecture professor Aldrete talks about fire arrows which obviously endeared him to me even further
as it turns out Wondrium has over six thousand hours of cool stuff like that about health science
maths history anything that you might want to know as the wrangler of a small child i greatly
appreciated the 'how to raise lifelong learners' series not just for being useful and practical
but also for being gently encouraging with it there is no way that this would go well if i
did it while trying to talk so i'm gonna hand you back to other jill now if you wonder about
stuff you'll love Wondrium and if you click on the link in the pinned comment or the description or
just go to wondrium.com/jillbearup you can start your free trial today your brain will love it.
well [blinks] i've seen worse and now it's time to see how this completely
ridiculous project turned out and in honour of sword and sandal movies of recent years
there will be a lot of gratuitous slow motion i'm a fairly haphazard costume maker not least
because i loathe ironing and pinning both of which are really quite important if you want
accurate results but thanks to this project i have now legitimately made a very sparkly skirt
albeit one that could probably use a lining and honestly i'm really pretty proud of how
this turned out if you'd like a free trial of Wondrium there is a link for you if you'd like
to see me commit other acts of sewing there is a playlist for you and i'll see you soon