Rae’s Rabbit Hole

Other tips: if you are going to buy things that aren’t pre-taxed, you need to make a habit of always doing the prep AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME. it will NEVER HAPPEN if you don’t.

Get the bulk pack of steaks! But you are never gonna eat them before they go bad. If you freeze them in individual ziplocks as soon as you unpack you probably will?

Get the celery, but you need to cut it ALL UP and store it in the fridge in water or it will rot.

Those instant campbells soups though? The ones you just open up, take the metal off, then put the cap back on and microwave? (Hell also the ones that are literally just in a cup?) I’ll go through those within a week of buying them. 

“did you hurt your knee?” “what’s wrong with your legs?” “why do you need that?” “what’s wrong with you?”

i constantly get shit from people in public when i use mobility aids and im over it

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

Fortunately, as you can see, Peanut Butter decided that they were no longer a threat a few weeks ago, so a few hours after they earned her approval I was finally free to wear them to dinner, as I have nobody to impress and it’s cold as hell. Then, of course, my niece saw them.

Now, my 18 month old niece is REALLY into bears right now. Owls are still cool, of course, but BEARS ARE WHERE IT’S AT. And my slipper paws? In her mind, those are the paws of a mighty bear. It was love at first sight. She giggles at them. She pets them like they’re kittens. She scoots onto the floor to rest her head on them during bedtime stories. She becomes immediately alarmed and indignant when I don’t have them on. Or, you know, if I do have them on, but they’re not in her immediate line of sight. “Ba?” She asks. “BA? BA? BA? BAAA? BA?!!!!!” (She is also very big on repetition.)

It has been like this for several weeks now.

Look, I’m an absolute sucker for this kid, and I will do basically anything on earth to make her happy. I’ve been wearing the bear slippers a lot recently. Like a lot a lot. The novelty of the novelty slippers has worn off over the weeks of having half of the word “bear” cooed/screamed at me on repeat.

So, being a problem-solver, I figured I’d get my niece her own pair of paw slippers, as 1. she’d love them, and incidentally 2. If she transferred her affection I could maybe have a meal without being forced by the toddler on the other side of the table to do this pose on command:

(I mean it’s not exactly that pose, but it’s actually even sexier when I do it.)

Anyway, guess what I can’t find in a toddler size? Fucking novelty paw slippers. Seriously, I have done my research, and I don’t believe they’re being manufactured. Hell, I couldn’t even find a sewing pattern for toddler slippers online that looked anywhere close to paws, which is WILD to me, considering that toddlers are basically the target market for animal dress up.

Well.

That’s not entirely true.

See, I did eventually find a pattern for really, really well designed bear paw slippers. Once I hit on the right search terms, I found a LOT of patterns, actually, and more tutorials for how to make them and modify their size than I ever dared hope for. I took the best of several designs, pieced them together, and I’m presently in the process of making them for my niece. Before I show you guys the final product, I wanted to pause for a moment to recognize the people who made this project possible:

Thank you, furries.

FURRIES WORK SO HARD

THIS IS SO HARD

so l encountered an issue, but i’m fine.

i’m gonna be fine.

so I finished the paws. I did it, it took so long, I learned so much, I felt really really great about it, and all that effort was worth it when I saw the sheer disbelief and delight that overtook my niece upon first laying eyes on them

“Ba?” she whispered. Then, “BA? BAAAAAA?!!! SSSSS! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

(she calls me, for reasons best known to her, “Sssss.”)

Anyway, it was exactly the reaction I had been hoping for. It was, very briefly, a perfect resolution to this story.

And then I tried to put them on her feet.

so, to backtrack a little, before embarking on this project I researched a LOT, and I consulted a LOT of different patterns, but the ones I referenced the most were this pattern by Bardic Bestiary and this guide/pattern by @matrices.

I want to be perfectly clear here, not just because Matrices has a tumblr (that is unbelievably full of tutorials and helpful ideas) and therefore might somehow encounter this post, but because both Matrices and the good folks at Bardic Bestiary have honestly made this inscrutable process something that was possible for me, an idiot: What went wrong was not their fault.

So, again, the paws I was trying to make were for a toddler, and toddlers typically lack the requisite resources to purchase and/or create their own fursuits. Given their percentage of the market share, it’s totally reasonable that I wasn’t able to find a pattern specifically for toddlers. But hey, I figured, I’m resourceful, so I just plopped all the pattern pieces into the same Illustrator window, selected the group, and then scaled it all down until the insole pattern piece was 5.25 inches long. Easy.

Everyone with children and/or costuming experience can stop laughing at me right now.

To explain what went wrong, here’s a scientific diagram of a typical adult leg that I made from zooming in on clipart of a soccer player.

And here’s an equally scientific diagram of a toddler’s leg.

In case you can’t see the issue that rapidly became apparent as I tried to shove my niece’s foot into the paws that she now desperately wanted to wear, I will share one further diagram.

That would give you the room at the top you need. When I have a problem i usually find whip stitching can help. It won’t look as pro as what you already made which is amazing btw, but it would work 🤔

Alternatively you could put a cut on each side & just whip stitch the edges. Then you don’t have to add a panel

What I eventually arrived at was basically what Zarnitza first proposed, with a slight variation. I was still flying blind at this point, so I decided not to do the same procedure on both paws until I was confident it would work. Here’s the way I approached it, which you can feel free to skip if you just want the payoff at the end:

I took out the liner, then ripped the back seam most of the way down the heel on both the faux fur shell and the liners. Then I traced the openings to make a super sloppy triangle template, went through the usual mess of cutting the fur (HOLY SHIT GUYS, EVEN FOLLOWING EVERY SINGLE BIT OF USEFUL ADVICE ON HERE, FUR IS ANNOYING TO WORK WITH), the much easier task of cutting fleece for the liner, and I sewed both the shell and the liner back up. As promised, this left me with a MUCH wider ankle. Easy to put on… but also easy to fall off/trip over. 

So here is where I think I might actually have been clever, I took the fur shell and I stitched in two elastic cords on either side of the triangle piece I’d just added, like this:

Okay, that’s an unintelligible diagram, but you get the point. Elastic bands, sewed in place with enough tension that the slippers would stay on her feet without cutting off her circulation, since that sort of thing is frowned upon. Finally, I put the liner back in, folded it over the shell, and stitched the cuff into place by hand. End result? 

I know you guys can’t see this (because I obscured it with a bear emoji) but holy shit… if she was this happy with ONE paw, I can’t wait to see what she thinks about getting to wear TWO of them tomorrow…. which will actually happen, because I just finished the final stitches on the second paw. They’re done. 

Thank you so much to everyone who helped me in any way during this long, weird journey I decided to take. I knew that this whole thing was pretty damn wholesome going in, but I honestly didn’t expect that I’d encounter the efforts of so many people who clearly put the time in learning how to make something, and put even more time in to share that knowledge with anyone who wanted to learn how to do it too. I’ve been feeling so bummed about what the past year has suggested about the average person’s willingness to sacrifice in order to help someone else out, and this was kind of a nice reminder that there are plenty of generous, thoughtful, genuinely brilliant people out there who just want to share something they love with the world… and a lot of those people, as it turns out, are furries. 

Not to get too emotional here but…

if youve misplaced a small handheld object, walk around your house or apartment and act like it's in your hand (hold your hand like you would holding your phone or keys for example). as you go around, watch where your hands naturally drift as you turn corners, walk past bookcases, etc.

it’s okay to use she/her pronouns but not want to be called a girl! it’s okay to use terms like brother or father for yourself but not go by he/him! it’s okay to be fine with “sister” but not “daughter!” it’s okay to use a title like “mr” but not want to be called a man! it’s okay to be a woman and not go by she/her!

(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)

[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.

This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.

There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.

As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?

It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California. NOTHING is universal.

This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.

It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.

And this is actually true; there are scientific articles comparing the cultural contexts for communication! It’s really neat.

So in (most parts of) America, we equate indirectness with politeness. “Excuse me, would it be possible for you to perhaps pass me that salt, if you don’t mind?” The more roundabout you are, the more we consider that a signal of social courtesy.

In Poland, not only is indirectness viewed as rudely wasting the listener’s time, but directness is viewed as communicating intimacy and friendliness. “Give me the salt.”

“ In U.S. Americans, Australians, Germans, and Anglo Canadians, literal truthfulness as well as efficiency in communication are highly valued and to some extent are a higher priority than personal or political sensitivities, especially in a business setting. Saying “No” or “I don’t know” is considered both honest and respectful of the party, since it does not mislead them or lead to “game-playing.” Problems are felt to be solved more rapidly if open and frank discussion is encouraged.”

“ In indirect cultures, on the other hand (Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Saudi Arabians, for example), directly communicating negative information is seen as impolite and crude, even in a business setting. In these situations, polite excuses or evasions, which both parties usually know and recognize as such, are given, and in extreme cases even outright fictions are invented—again with recognition by both parties that a diplomatic strategy is being employed. Problems are felt to be solved more productively if they are handled with tact and discretion. “