#dangoproject

Dango Project: COMPLETE

This journey was absolutely phenomenal. Building a fursuit from start to finish is something that an artist should definitely experience at least once in their lives. To build this beautiful thing you poured your soul into and strut around where people can see your hard work.

Dango debuted at Confuzzled 2024, and it was an absolute blast!

Thank you to all my amazing friends who cheered me on during the ups and downs of making this big ole lad, and the people who were with me to give me the confidence to have some fun during the event.

You're all wonderful.

Suits in the pictures:

Bagworm (fish) : @eelcakes

Nira (dragon) : @boesesglurak

Ray (cat) : @blossom-beast

Building Dango: Part 14

At last!!

Sewed the green-blue fur blend onto the neck, and put the liner in as well and ooooh goodness it looks so dang good pinned together. Wowowowow. Incredible.

For the neck lining i. Well i ran out of the liner fabric lol. So I got this new liner that is 4 way stretch purple glitter lycra that Im also going to use for the lining of paws. Its so nice to the touch...

Next up, the paws!!

I got this 2 way stretch red vinyl. And Ive had it for quite a bit since I ordered it a couple months early in case it took a really long time to ship from Poland. And it was shoved in my fabric box for a couple weeks, constantly skrunked and unskruned until the skrunk was too much and there were CREASES.

Since this is vinyl/pvc that also stretches, I was EXTREMELY hesitant to iron it in case it melts. Even if the back is woven, its still a gamble. So after reading for advice online I came to the age ole trick: have a hot fucking shower and let the steam uncrease it.

So off it went into the bathroom with me- I needed a scrub anyway LOL

And honestly!! It did work! I left it hanging for a good few hours and it became mostly crease free where I needed it to be :)

This fabric is going to be our claws. Machine sewed. After making so many beetle plushies this was child's play at this point.

The overall jist of the paws is to make the underside fluffy as well as the knuckles, to hide where the vinyl meets with the real fabric because I know that wasnt going to be super neat with the way theyre made.

The first part is easily machine sewed! All the claws, and the palms. But actually sewing the fingers together? Boy thats a challenge for hand sewing only.

Blanket stitched together. And homestly??? Honestly??? Im fucking in love. And they FIT

Building Dango: Part 2

I actually finished this step a couple weeks ago but was too busy to post with con prep, so here it is now!

In this edition were getting the EVA foam together. I got a big ole cutting board before starting for about 7 quid so its easier to cut out the large shapes.

But first! Tracing.

We got ourselves the paper pattern to trace and slightly edit. Drop that sucker on the foam. And start cutting.

For the eyes I am planning to have them domed. Which means I got these googly eyes im going to deface to steal the plastic dome from.

Cutting the circle was honestly the most nerve-wracking part of this, and I did it in 4 segments just to be as careful as possible.

I wouldng exactly call cutting the EVA foam easy tbh. I was using mainly 10mm super high density foam as the base structure. That is to make sure that the base head is strong and isnt going to warp during movement. My exacto knife wasnt entirely... long enough to cut through it in one go, and I wouldnt say I was strong enough to do that even if it could lol. My arm and hand hurt afterwards, and theres some parts that came out a little crooked.

A lot of EVA sculptors cut their edges at an angle, and honestly, i was too scared to do that and mess up the angle with how *rough* cutting this already was. So I opted for just simple straight edges. I probably shouldve added some extra space here or there and thought about the fact this foam is 10mm thick. But oh well.

Whats important is its cut and we can move onto gluing.

Now we could use hot glue, or super glue. But the recommendation from Pros is Contact Cement. So thats what were gonna use.

Honestly this was pretty easy. You mark one side and swipe it down evenly with a scrap piece, you leave it to dry for like a minute or two, do the second piece where the first is gonna connect. Let that dry. Then put the two pieces together. Revolutionary shit im telling you. The bond is so damn strong too im shook.

Theres several parts I wasnt too happy about though. The top and longest piece wasnt long enough and ill need to compensate for it later. And some cuttings werent identical like I wanted. The biggest issue was the fact I didnt take into account the thickness of the foam overlapping at the jaw. So its. Well it doesnt exactly fit right now. But that will be fixed with sanding. A lot of sanding.

Youre probably looking and pointing at the black pieces of foam too. Thats 4mm low density foam. I wanted it for building details.

For the horn I ran into the problem of it possibly being heavy. And with its placement, it needs to be *light*. Initially I was going to use three pieces of 10mm high density foam. But that sucker weighed about 70 grams together. Thats. A lot. To be put on the tip of the mask.

You may be quick to suggest to carve out two pieces of low density foam as the horn, bend it, and make it hollow. And to that I say: im not experienced enough with eva foam to do that and also i dont want it to get crushed inside a luggage into a deflated Thing.

So i tried to weigh up the difference between the low and high density. And it turns out i can just use 2 pieces of low density foam that equal the size of the high density one, but it weights *half as much*. So instead i used high density as the core of the horn, surrounded by 4 pieces of low density. Which reduced the horn to about 40 grams! Yippe!!

Well it's that time again where Jay attempts to make another fursuit but this time from scratch and of a creature that has Zero Tutorials documented on because I hate my life apparently

DANGO TIME!

This guy is a fantasy hybrid based on a pangolin. That's all we really need to know because the prominant feature is his pangolin scales, and the rest is made up.

BASE MATERIALS WE'RE GONNA USE:

EVA foam- high density 1cm

EVA foam- low density 5mm

Normal foam 1in thick for neck

Normal foam 1cm thick for scales

Craft foam as a tester

Fabrics

Eye mesh

Googly eyes

Magnets

The core features of this head I want to incorporate are:

Moving jaw

Detatchable magnetic ears and antennae

Whiskers on springs

Removable neck on a zipper

Removable tongue

Parts I'd like to make:

Head

Paws

Wings (tryhard)

Tail (tryhard x2)

Feet (what is wrong with you)

This is no easy project and I only have about a month to tackle this so lets get to it!

Starting with a simple little model from sculpey, I taped it with masking tape, marked the pattern down, cut it up, traced on paper, then went to scaling it up on my computer which was no easy feat. But in the end we have ended up with a more or less correctly size pattern.

For the test of seeing if its fits and is sized correctly I used flimsy craft foam to put it together and immediately found it Too Large. But otherwise I liked the shape!

Back to the digital drawing board, rescaling, crushing the snoot in from being too long aaaaaand I was out of craft foam so I used a cardboard box instead (it worked better than the craft foam honeslty.)

And it looks pretty good! The size is nice and its pretty sturdy. Only adjustements that were needed was scrunching up the jaw a little and lifting the cheakbone some. I added the brow spines and secondary cheek and we got ourselves a good base!

It's still a large-ish head, but I cannot go smaller due to how big the eyes gotta be, but it's okay.

Thankfully the head is pretty blocky on this guy, so I don't exactly have to worry too much about organic shapes (for once)

The sight on this guy is going to be great too. The eyes are going to be domes using large googly eyes which are 10cm in diameter. That gives a GREAT peripheral vision to the sides, but not much in the front which is fairly normal for fursuit. Thankfully though the jaw will move, so Ill have extra sight through the jaws.

First up finishing the jaw.

I love doing this sepcific ass style of cutting out symmetrical small parts of fabric. Essentially you dont even cut out the piece separately, just draw em on a slab, cut out two sides, line em up, wnd rhen sew the shapes on- and THEN cut them

Now we have several doritoes.

Just sewed these onto the fabric itself, and for the top jaw i sewed them onto little pieces of black eva foam and glued em onto the top skull.

Then glued the whole jaw fabric on... sewed the seams.. and voila!!

I also did the whiskers, which are on springs that i gutted two pens for. Theyre silley but I cant add videos to a post so Ill share those later.

Next up, sewing the neck piece, which is the easier part.

The harder part is the actual scales. This whole fabric is literally just the crest and one side of the scales. Hell. Im fearing 2 meters of fabric may not be enough but im holding my breath.

Some of the scales have accents, so I had to go through the gruelling process of sewing all of that up together. I fucked up one of them by cutting past the seam allowance and into the actual fabric part so :") had to redo that scale. Thankfully i could reuse the grey for another piece though so not all was lost.

And here they are!! One side of the scales!!

Making Dango: Part 11

The part where he is starting to look like an actual Thing

Building Dango: Part 17

We are... so close to the finish line now. Just a little more.

Let's finish off the tail.

To make an invisible belt loop I'll be using this tutorial.

Essentially it is cutting two pieces of EVA foam in the shape you need, one with a slip in part cutaway, a tube of fabric that goes through the holes between the eva foam, and then your top part pattern.

I'm opting for a raw meat pattern that I always thought looked super super cool!

The meaty bits are sewn onto the dark teal using applique, as well as the bone part. The underneath teal is then cut away, as well as slits in the blue where the hidden belt loop is.

Then you just cut off the excess from applique and you have yourself a pattern!

You then hot glue the pieces together (space left over for the belt strip to wiggle in, carefully ladder stitch the edges of the belt strip into your appliqued fabric slits, and then sew the tail shut into the edges of your seam allowance of the tail itself.

Now for the pincers and feet, it was pretty straight forward, the same as with the hand claws. The pincers have upholstery foam in them, and the feet are just stuffed. I then ladder stitched them on once it was all together.

And MAN am I HAPPY with the tail. A thicker belt loop keeps the tail nice and snug eveb though its got a little bit of weight to it.

I definitely want to make a bigger version of this year, but Ill have to figure out a way to store it easily. Perhaps have it be inflatable :)

And weRE ALMOST DONE NOW!!!!

Dango Project: Part 15

Continuing the paws!

Like mentioned in the previous update, I got a 4 way stretch purple lycra for the inner lining of the paws simply because the 2 way stretch fabric test didnt work earlier.

Pin that sucker up, carefully machine saw it, and there it is.

The pattern has been adjust further. Honestly I made 1 more prototype before this. A certain interesting quality to this fabric.. one of the ways is stretchier than the other, so the first one I made of this fabric was made on the less stretchy side. And it felt tight.

So I adjusted the pattern just a little bit more in size for the fingers, and the wrist/cuff that I extended to match the width of the actual minky and fur. And also switched to the stretchier side.

Once thats sewed and perfected I could sew it onto one side of the paw. Only at the wrist, the end, and between the fingers. Originally I wasn't going to do the finger tips, however after a test I decided to do it because it was really hard to slip in and out of them when the fingers kept inverting inside the paw when I took em out.

But the claws are sewn vertically, not horizontally. So I had to do this very awkward quick sew through the center of the fabric to the seam allowance of the claw.

But it worked!!

I couldve honestly made the claws juuuust a teeny tiny bit thicker to account for the seam allowance, but its fine :)

Dont forget about stuffing the claw tips so its not just empty air! Theres about a centimeter of empty space between the end of my finger and the tip of the claw. So that needed stuffed lightly!

Last part is the bias tape. Ive never used bias tape. So this was another learning experience.

On the first paw I cut it off like 3mm too short to fully cover the stitching, and also placed the meetpoint of it like at the top of the paw? In view?

Things you dont think about prior.

However the second paw came out stellar.

I ALSO had to shave the knuckle fur down. Because it was comically long and dwarfed the minky scales LOL.

However none of the clippers in the house would buzz this god forsaken rabbit fur. So I had to do it with scissors because I am Not Willing to drop €80 on clippers. Its not perfect by any means. Theres some balder spots if you look closely. But its good enough for my first time shaving fur! And with SCISSORS.

Here they are! :]