Build Diary

Building the back and shaft of Rocky’s feet took a while. I did a basic pattern piece that would join up with the shape of the front of the paw. Then I shaved down a bunch of fur to 3/4″ pile and cut two of those out. I modified (and shortened) another pair of the…

Edit: I’ve updated the gallery with the images it was lacking. Rocky’s hind feet are always drawn as long and plain grey, with only two toes suggested by a midline, and no paw pads on the underside) My costume version of Rocky’s feet are being built on a pair of simple grey deck shoes with…

Today I added the tail mounting port to the “hero” fursuit body and did a quick try-on with the body, tail, head and paws.I’m super happy with how it looks! I’m putting this gallery under an additional spoiler password. If you really want to see the photos, the PW is Spoil Me Sweetie!(don’t forget the…

Reinforcing the rigging harness I needed to stiffen the tail support across the shoulder blades because even the heavy hide I used was too flexible. Fortunately I’ve acquired a healthy set of power tools in the course of working on my townhouse and building both Tiki Dalek and Thinbot, so it only took about 20…

A note on piecing the fur I’ve mentioned a couple times I’m using a special technique to to piece the fur so the seams are almost invisible. The first trick is carefully cutting the yardage from the back with a sharp blade, cutting just through the knit backing, so the pile (fur) isn’t chopped off….

Two Paws are Better Than One After the successful (but requiring lots of handwork to fix gaps in the seams) on the left paw, I set out to build the right paw a little more methodically. First I trimmed the batting layer just about 1/8″ in from the edges. Then I hand basted the batting…

While waiting for the zippers to arrive for the body, I started working on Rocky’s paws. I used as a reference Matrices’ excellent tutorial and pattern for basic paws. Of course, Rocky has only 3 fingers, so I had to modify the pattern for my purposes. After some dexterity tests I decided to group my…

Monday night (Mar 11) I finished marking out all the fursuit body pieces (4 front and back panels, 4 sleeve front and back pieces). I then set out to cut them all out (sans seam allowance, as marked). The best way to do this is from the back with a sharp blade, cutting just through…

This weekend has been some finishing work on the tail and hat, which has entailed an enormous quantity of handwork. Finishing the tail While the main assembly of the tail was complete, neither end had been stitched up yet. The tip of the tail had been left open to make it possible to insert the…

Next up is building Rocky’s body. He’s such a simple character design that I’m going for a very simple onesie style fursuit rather than one with sculpted padding. I’m using the Andrea Schewe Simplicity 2853 pattern for the starting point. I will, however be using a number of tricks (including Matrices’ technique for installing the…