Friday, November 23, 2012

Adventures in Fur - Paws (or Gloves)

Quite a while ago, after a bit of beer, the topic of fursuits came up. For those uninitated, this is what Furries wear... also Furries seem to pay quite a lot of money for these things. So a while back, a friend was threatening to buy some furfeet for 150euros (!) ... I drunkenly texted back NO! I WILL MAKE SOME FOR WAY CHEAPER FOR YOU!

Okay I've still not made the furfeet. I do, however, now have the materials! Then I got sidetracked by the fact that I have quite a lot of fur fabric... hey I could make furry gloves. Hmmm...

This website is the most amazing resource out there http://www.matrices.net/fursuiting.asp Seriously, if you ever needed to know how to put together a whole fursuit or just parts of one, you should look at that website. There is so much useful hints and tips. Stuff like using hair clippers to shave the fur to get more shape and detail seems like common sense to me now but I wouldn't have thought to try it (or thought it was so easy) if it were not for the videos on that website.

Gushing out of the way, I used the tutorial for the fur hands on the Matrices Fursuiting website. I was having one of those days where I really wanted to work on something but felt I couldn't due to lack of some sort of materials... My remit from my friend was black faux leather pads on the paws. I ordered some but was sitting and waiting for it. I looked around the flat and found some very thin, dark dusty blue suede leather. This might do... These may not be paws for my friend but if I made a pair of my own, I can make all the mistakes on these and then do better for friend who bought the fur fabric for me in the first place.

So the furglove making continued. I drew out a rough palm-sized pad and cut it out of leather.
Paw
I was surprised my sewing machine could handle the fur fabric and the leather but it seemed fine. I didn't follow through on the tutorial exactly - I went for more of a loose zigzag stitch rather than a satin-style stitching. It still seemed to work out pretty good
Paw pad
I learned that it's a lot easier to tack down the pads before hitting the sewing machine. Also it leads to slightly less huge bunches of fabric, as the leather sneaks around against the fur which moves around quite a bit.

Furry Palm :P
All sewn up and ready for some shaving. I am so thankful I've trained myself to be ambidextrous. I had no problem shaving either glove using either hand. Wearing the glove while shaving with the other hand allowed me to move my fingers around and get more shaping in between the fingers.

Trimmed a bit...

And here's both paws
PAWS!

Hopefully I'll be moving onto the furfeet sometime soon... I've basically got the materials together, it's just finding the time to collaborate with friend to make sure shoes fit and final design/shaping.

No comments:

Post a Comment