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So we have the Horrifically Bad Fursuits! thread so why not a counter where we appreciate the really talented craftsmanship that some in this community produce?

I get it, a lot of furries don't have the money to commission, so some make their own. But there are people who really shouldn't make their own. This thread is about them. Go nuts and post your horror suits! (That stain on the second picture tho)

I love watching fursuit videos~ This one is easily one of my new favorites~ I have several other favorites as well but I want to post them one at a time. What videos are your favorites? :3 (or photos) Watching videos and looking at photos really inspires me to try harder and improve my own~

I'm building my first fursuit, and I thought ynz guys might like to see how it's done, for reference or whatever. I'm by no means a professional, yet. So here's the photos I took along the way building Littlerock, the archaeopteryx. They're not yet finished, but I intend to update the thread with continuation posts as I keep building. This post will focus on the head; a semi-toony balaclava-base with green foam and elastic build. It features a moving jaw and follow-me toony eyes. First off, it's very important to have a rough idea of what you're going to build. Draw it, detail it with how you're going to build it. This will give you a reference to look back on and double check each step in the building process to make sure you haven't forgotten any important details, but you may find yourself deviating somewhat from your plans while you learn. That's okay! Do what you gotta do to make it good. Suffice to say I did not follow my own blueprints entirely, for a variety of reasons. Live and learn. Next, gather your materials. In this case, I need three colors of fleece, some type of sculpting material, green high-density foam, plastic sheet canvas, three colors of faux fur, buckram, a balaclava, nylon leggings, a zipper, stiffened felt, some 1" wide woven elastic, sewing and hot glue supplies, sheet foamie, acrylic paint, buckram, a mannequin head, toothbrushes, and a slicker brush. Supplies I gathered and never needed include; a clear plastic Christmas ornament, heavy plastic and spring for the jaw mech, and a pivot mech for the eyebrow. All told this cost somewhere around $200, but many of the supplies are sufficient for the rest of the costume, and the tools are reusable. The entire partial will likely cost me around $230, however it's not a padding-heavy design, and it's being built for a surprisingly small person. Me. I'm tiny af. Starting This is the initial foam work, the very basis, and most basic point. Nothing fancy, nothing set in stone. The elastic is measured as a loop that goes around the wearer's chin, and around the back of the head. Another piece attaches to this, going over the top of the head from cheek to cheek. This is both the movement mechanism for the jaw, and the tension that keeps the head largely in place on the wearer. This elastic is sewn to the balaclava, while on a mannequin head. Make sure your mannequin is the same dimensions as your own head! They can be altered by shaving down and building up with foam. Measure your own head before beginning. Now start adding foam! Green foam can be cut with boxcutters, scissors, and those weird motorized turkey carvers. Attach it to things, including more foam, with hot glue, or other approved adhesives. I'd used a high-temp glue gun for this project. Initial foamwork will look rough, blocky, and generally ugly as all sin. That's okay! It's supposed to. You're only laying down the basics here. Essentially, I just kept adding foam in thin sheets and small chunks and nibbling away at it with scissors until I liked where it was going. Keep checking for symmetry, and remember, if you mess something up, it's ALWAYS BEST to remove the issue, and fix it. That's just part of the process, accidents happen. Keep going, but make sure you take frequent breaks, get up and move around. If you've been at it for hours, get sleep. A refreshed brain builds better, and makes more sensible decisions about how to approach a project, and it's great for your body and mind to pause the project for a moment, clean up whatever mess you've made, and move about for a bit. Try the head on, check it in the mirror, make sure everything's seated correctly, moving appropriately, and comfortable. This is essential to being happy with your project. After you have the face roughed out, try making mock-up eyes. These will help you to decide a number of things, including what size and shape they need to be, if you need to adjust the eyesockets (I clearly needed to, lmao), and what angle you need to place them in to insure a not-derp look. Bear in mind that you need to be able to see out of these, and if you need room for glasses, adjust accordingly. If you're making a more realistic suit, with resin eyes instead of toony ones, the vision ports will NOT be the eye itself, as you cannot see through resin eyes. Most builds including resin eyes have tear-duct vision ports. Build accordingly! So at this point, I jumped ahead and made good eyes, which eventually get re-painted and re-positioned several times. I used the cardboard template and made the same, in duplicate, out of sheet foamie. I also cut out the iris and pupil area, painted and glued in buckram irises. I see through these. The eyesockets in the photo here still needed adjusting, which i do get to later. From here, I began the mouth. It is lined with pink fleece, painted with acrylic paints, applied with brushes and dried slowly with toothbrushes. The teeth are Crayola Model magic, which, in hindsight, was a mistake. It's rather fragile, and takes on particles pretty easy, but it fit the bill of being easy to shape, cheap, and very lightweight. Each was painted and sealed with a clear topcoat. The tongue is carved from more green foam, and covered with more pink fleece and paint. So far, nothing here is sewn, everything is glued in place with hot glue. At some point, I added a temporary vision port between the eyes. I left it in the final for ventilation, but it doesn't provide much. The nostrils are liked with more fleece, since they're actual holes. I intended on installing an altered bird call into the roof of the mouth, but I never did. I cut the fleece inside the mouth ENTIRELY too close, and ended up working around it in later steps with another layer. Living and learning continues. Fleece is also glued around the eyes, to hide the green foam in the eye sockets, as well as glue holding the eyes in. Next, the roof of the mouth was made and installed. It is a traced-to-fit piece of plastic canvas mesh, glued in place, and covered with more pink fleece, which was then painted. The empty can of soda is there to keep the mouth open, and paint off of the lower teeth. Added top teeth and painted them after the paint dried on the roof of the mouth. More fleece is added in the back of the mouth to cover green foam and keep the illusion going. More paint is applied accordingly. The inner cheek muscle here was a challenge. It is vital for anatomical reasons, and it also hides the wearer's face. Initially, I used a bit of fleece, but it proved to be entirely too bulky, and impaired the jaw from closing properly. Instead, I painted a gray pair of nylon leggings, cut to shape, and glued in place. The nylons prove stretchy enough to hold their shape without being wrinkly or bulky. More foam work occurred around the wearer's ears here. I wanted to have excellent hearing while in suit, so rather than foam over the ears, I instead foamed carefully around them, and glued in a bridge of buckram over the gap. It is strong enough to hold the faux fur in it's proper shape, and breezy enough to hear through, as well as help with ventilation. Somewhere around here, I also adjusted the eyesockets' foam work as well, snipping out a small piece to pull the eyes closer together, and shaped more above the eyes. Time for a huge mistake! The entire face of this head is fleece, which is notorious for showing seams, so I did my damndest to make it of the fewest number of pieces. The bottom jaw I attempted to make of two pieces, which ended up looking hillariously bulky and generally stupid. I ripped it off shorty after taking these photos and replaced it with two differently cut pieces, pulled and glued very tightly. Now that a better job is on the bottom jaw, it's time for the pattern. Brown packing tape, and plastic wrap. Packing tape won't stick terribly to bare foam, so it doesn't need to be lined there, but the rest of the head needs plastic wrap liner. This tape is then carefully marked for sewing seams, and is cut off. Note that the mouth is open for this, to make sure there will be plenty of material around the cheeks, as to not restrict movement. You can also see that the face is all one piece. I did end up making seams around the nostrils, but they're well hidden by the overall shape of the foam, and generous paint. Here we have the new lower-jaw cover, as well as the face all attached. The eyes glued down shut looks like absolute nightmare fuel, yes. Opened them up vary carefully with snips, glued the lids into place, and continued. I ended up adding two strips of fleece beneath the eyelids for more character. No sewing yet, this is all glue work. Paaaainting, begin! Drybrushing, (aka paint on a brush, rather than airbrushing,) on fleece takes a bit of practice, so if you're gonna go there, practice on something else first. Brush it into the fibers with stiff bristles, like toothbrushes, and don't let it dry in chunks. Overly-thinned paint will bleed through the cloth and stain the material beneath the fleece's nap. Be careful! Now for the rest of the pattern. I know it's tempting, but do. NOT. use cheap faux fur. Acceptable fur usually runs $20/y and higher, cheaper fur looks, feels, and wears terribly. Cheap fur cannot be trimmed and shaved down like good fur, and it tends to fall apart much easier, as well as failing to accept paint like good fur. It's worth the extra money. The fur I'm using here is from Distinctive fabrics, ivory, black, and camel 2" shag. I'm pretty sure the ivory is discontinued now. I bought it ages ago. Leave a good quarter inch seam allowance on the edge of each piece, and 'mile markers', those dashes that cross over seam lines on each seam help to align each piece while sewing, so that curves are made, and edges line up properly. They should be marked on the cloth itself as well! Make sure the nap direction of the fur is going in the correct direction for each piece by drawing an arrow showing such on each pattern piece before removing. The hood, the part which covers the head, and the cape, the part which covers the neck and collarbone, are sewn with upholstery thread, using the best stitch ever; the blanket stitch. Heck yes. "Raw edges" of fur, where the backing is visible at the very edge of a cut piece, need to be hidden before attaching the hood and cape. I do this by hot gluing them down to the backing of the fur, very carefully, utilizing the quarter-inch to half-inch seam allowance left over during pattern cutting. Glue the hood and cape down fittingly after this part, sew it onto the balaclava where areas may take extra stress. Shaving and painting. Shaving is done with pet-fur clippers, and scissors. It's scary, but it's absolutely necessary to shaping the face and showing off the detail in your foamwork! Never clipper the fur down to the backing. Leave at least a quarter inch of fuzz. I'm also texturing the fur to resemble feathers, using scissors. Bear in mind that cutting any amount of fur is going to make a massive mess. Don't breathe it in. Painting faux fur is much easier than it seems like it would be. Acrylic paints, lightly thinned with water, are applied as necessary, and gently brushed through the fur with a slicker brush. Make sure to brush the fur occasionally while it dries to keep it from clumping. NEVER USE A HOT HAIR DRYER ON FAUX FUR. Heat ruins faux fur! You can use a fan, or a dryer on COLD, but never on HOT. The fur in these photos is still wet, and will go back to being fluffy when properly dry! At some point, I also made a pair of ears out of fleece and attached them to the head. No biggie. Feathers here were made of fleece, sewn like a sock, fitted over a piece of stiffened felt. I ended up making these much smaller than I initially planned, because it became difficult to control them past a certain size without wiring or hard plastic, and I wasn't ready to go there. More detail painting on and around these, and attachment of feathers. Some time later, I had a friend help me measure the cape, and I sewed and attached it along with a zipper, which runs from the nape of the neck down the cape. The zipper keeps the shape of the neck thin, while making the head easy enough to put on. It's black, hidden in black fur. That's about it, really. FIRST FURSUIT HEAD, COMPLETE!! Feel free to ask questions, post criticism, lollygag and whatnot! I'll be posting in this thread as I complete other body parts. The final piece will only ever be a partial, so on the to-do list are wings, and a tail. The feet are already done, but I'm unhappy with them and intend to re-do them entirely. Hope this is educational, if not entertaining.

So made some good headway on this project so I'm finally posting it, lol. It will be a fullsuit and for my boyfriend to wear to Fanime this year, so late May deadline. Here is the creepy start: If it doesn't look dumb at first, something is wrong. X D (I also frankensteined in an old abandoned base of mine with fresh foam to save time). Anyways, I forgot to take inbetween pics soooo... I took some artistic liberty and threw in some extra cat and alien features. I'm going to change a few things (like the top of the head) but otherwise it is good to go. Eyes are going to be 3D. There is extra foam layers to give the glasses good room (Four layers vs my normal two). We are using white fur instead of light purplegray and the purple for his tail lready arrived. I really like how it is shaping up. : )

This post isn't going to be as flashy as my first post from FAF, but anyways.... My current fullbody suit project is a Yellow Xweetok (from Neopets). Since the creature has such a large head, I buffed up the base's size as well: The Foam base is built on top of a bike helmet to help with support and size. Markings have been doodled on but the head is still going to get some foam work done on it. The eyes are going to be follow-me eyes with plastic scleras and foamies for the 3D look. The visible areas are buckram painted with acrylics. Eye wip: I'm pretty sure I finally found the right fur for the project and I've begun work on my duck-tape-dummy. More to come later.

My newest project is a prear I've been working on. This will be my sixth head and I've dubbed it as a candy-colored fox due to the blue and pink fur markings that are planned. Here is the base: It's going to be static-jawed but wide open so ventilation will be amazing. I like to make the ears first: The inside of the mouth and the nose are felt. The outside of the ears are luxury shag and the insides are felt and striped fox. Its right ear is sewn while its left ear is just pinned- pretty big difference in how something looks before and after sewn. Eyes: Sorry for the sideways pic. Anyways, the blue is a plastic that cuts reaaaally nicely. The iris and pupils are painted on buckram (this photo is pre-sealant). I chose brown because cookies go nicely with candy. Some more fur: (Sorry, mobile is being a turd so this segment is above) Here the sideburns, forehead, and some of the back of the head is cut and/or sewn. The other blue in the eyes are foamies while the black is also foamies but I got sick of that so ripped the black ones off.

Fursuiting/cosplaying has always been very fascinating to me. It took me years until I felt a little more sure about pursuing the hobby someday - especially now that I've come into a job, and a way to travel. I haven't gotten a fursuit yet due to the possibility that I may get one for naught. I'd like to explore what I could do beforehand, and also learn how to wear the costume safely yet still have fun. I have a few dilemmas that I'd love to have addressed if possible since I am nervous about trying it out! I have been reading some fursuiter guides too, but still - As someone who's very shy in real life, I usually do not know where to reach out for any places to visit, or any furmeets. I'm aware that cons are a good place to start too once I can somehow get there. I do not know anyone else that I'm close to who does fursuits too although I know a few people who are fine with being handlers (I've discussed getting one before with family). Unfortunately, those handlers are from another state, and I only get to see them a few weeks out of the year. I could always learn to make some new friends though? lol For a first time (potential) fursuiter, what's a good way to start using it? Like... is it best to "break it in" inside the household? Maybe bring it to family parties if people are comfortable with it? What are some good, yet safe areas if a fursuiter is still sticking around in their own town? Any other places to try to legally meet with up other fursuiters/handlers in a public area? Is it better to get a commission than a premade fursuit? I know that it may be a struggle if I aim for fullsuits. I'm pretty petite despite my age (aka I'm 4'11). I do not really have much of a fursona either. Any other advice is much appreciated! And I'm sorry if I do not make any sense. Sometimes my brain just dies in the middle of asking questions, or I do not know how to word it properly. Thanks!

Do I have to wash it? Because the problem with washing it is that I have nowhere to put it while it's drying I have this fursuit spray that I use called Wash Your Paws, and after every time I wear my suits I spray them down with it and then brush them. Never have had a problem with it so I see no other reason why I should. I use Folex for stains

Lucario Fursuit Head $150 -Foam Base -Foamies for eyes with Buckram for vision -Tear-duct vision (and through eyes) -Designed for head ~23 inches (fits nicely but is a tight fit to initially put it on) -No zipper in hood (hood only extends to bottom of the neck because that's all I needed) -Jaw base isn't attached to the rest of the head to help with putting head on Please note that the head is this cheap for a reason. The ears were old ones used from a previous Lucario head and the fur lies in the wrong direction (however, brushing the fur back makes this hard to notice). Jaw is slightly crooked but isn't too noticeable when being worn. Otherwise, markings are all sewn except for around the ears where they are glued down. Ventilation is amazing with spots through the eyes, tear-ducts, muzzle, and mouth (make sure you dry off the eyes and tear-ducts after extended wear to prevent the buckram from warping). I'll throw in his blue-fur neck-guard (which I used to wear under the hood and bodysuit to prevent skin from showing). Pics of the head (completed and WIP shots) can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.657920367672098.1073741837.100003624213812&type=1&l=a8ca3b8130 -Please note, I'm only selling the head, nothing else- I've worn the head a few times but it will be fully cleaned and ready for a new wearer (you're going to want to buy a balaclava or something to wear under the head so you don't get too much sweat into the foam). I just am not happy with his look and want to make a new one now that my skill has increased. By selling him, I'm able to give him a new home rather than having him live in storage his whole life. If you have any questions or wish to see different photos in very specific poses or angles or whatever, feel free to let me know as I'll be happy to oblige. Shipping is about 20 (as the ears demand a large box) but I'll cover some of it so $12 for shipping in continuous 48 us states. I also have his old feet for sale. They are $40 for just them, or $20 when bundled with the head (please note that they might alter shipping prices). I can't remember what size they are but they were built on slippers and fit me (my current shoes are an 8 in woman's) nicely. The ankles are less forgiving but should fit average to slim ankles just fine. You're going to want to replace the zippers as the ones used are bad (one broke within minutes of being at an event in full costume). The bottom of the feet are exposed shoe and fur and have held up nicely. More pictures are in the above link.

Just finished this guy up. I've nicknamed him Jet Jay because of his coloration (the blue and white on the back of the head are different colors than the face but it isn't too different). I've been working on and off on him since January 2013 (pretty much put him aside whenever anything else popped up). He is an older suit of mine but I hav e replaced a few outdated things (eyes mainly). Features: -23 inch head -Static eyes and mouth -Plastic eyes with hand-painted buckram eyes (sealed with acrylic spray) -Felt teeth -Fleece tongue and mouth -Clay nose, painted with acrylic, and sealed with acrylic spray -Nice ventilation and comfortable to wear -Visibility is limited directly ahead but vision otherwise is really nice (through pupil and iris, kinda through mouth but barely) The head is not lined so you are going to want to wear balaclava beneath to prevent sweat damage to the foam. The neck hood is also not the greatest (like I said, it was an earlier head) but works. Head only worn for testing and photographs. Comes from smoke-free but petfriendly home. 100% handsewn. Seeking to sell for $250 usd +shipping. Shipping is about $10 in the lower 48 states. Willing to ship elsewhere but be prepared for a jump in shipping prices. Pm or post here if you have any questions. You can also email me at misomie@ymail.com but I don't check it as often as here.

If anyone wants info, tips, etc. on commercial sewing machines, I might be able to help. I currently have a Nakajima Rex sewing machine, btw. Big and sturdy, it will sew anything you can fit under the presser foot. That includes fingers. Don't ask how I know. My tigress has a '50's vintage Brother home machine that runs better than most new machines. $27 USD from a goodwill place. Kel

Here he is: http://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/misomie/folder/51346/Roark This is my fifth head, second tail, fourth pair of handpaws, second pair of feetpaws, and first body (that wasn't thrown together stupidly with glue). Horns and nose are DVC, fur is luxury shag and gorilla shag. Teeth are clay and eyes are buckram with foamies. Claws and whiskers are fleece (I'm commissioning a new set of handpaws that are hard clawed as I can't work with said materials yet).