#kenkuproject

I will be taking better pictures at Holiday Matsuri Florida!! So if you're coming as well dont be shy to come say hello :]

The fabric came! I couldnt find a scaled fabric thay didnt cost a kidney to import, so shiny velvet it is.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. I was in feather hell. All 110 feathers are now carved and reinforced.

The tail feathers were the ones that needed the most help.

The largest is about 40cm in legth. We cant have a floppy tail on our hands now can we?

Using a 3mm garden wire I have found in y box that was supposed to be used for sculptures is being repurposed after a 5 year wait (sometimes it pays off to be a hoarder).

I hot glued the wires on very carefully and then used foam clay to secure it on top and make it invisible. That stuff is really cool. It feels like youre working with slime putty and it dries to be literal foam??? Insane.

It looks ugly rn but once its all spray painted itll be fine.

However it takes a couple days to dry and my thumb muscle was in excruciating pain therefore it was time to move on.

GLOVES. I used pattern #2 from my tests and slightly adjusted it for the wrist and rest of the arm. Aligning the material to sew was actual hell. Do not talk to me. I pinned it all up, left to the post office, came back and it was scrunkled again. Jesus christ.

Anyway.

Gloves! And they fit on pretty snug too. I have the claws varnished and will glue those on top once i have the feathers done too to minimise crying over having super glue all over my hands.

Theres elastic at the end of the gloves to keep it on my arm once the feathers are on. And if thats still not enough ill figure out some kind of loops or whatever.

I have also varnished the mask by now. The first coat i thought i was going to sob. There were patches and it looked ugly and i thought i was gonna have to remove the varnish and my alcohol didnt work and then i read to just apply a second coat and it WORKED so now im a happy camper.

The feathers are constantly curing. Im using PlastiDip as a primer with 3 layers on each side. I really hope I dont run out of black spray paint once I get there.

Theres a lot of them.

Fuck the feathers though Its time for the most nerve wrecking part that made me have 2 consecutive midnight breakdowns and it is currently day 3 and this may be breakdown numero tres but we will see.

On a Previous Installment of Jay has a mental illness we cut the pattern out for the head and havent touched it since. Well this changes today because I did cut out the fabric AND did everything else.

Sewing it together was. A fucking challenge. I may have bested the beast that is the sewing machine but my skills are not up to quote and i really shouldve followed the seam allowance i gave myself for a snugger fit BUT ANYWAY. It was all sewn. And there was so much fur. There is still so much fur. My clothes? Fur. The tables? Fur. The floor? Fur. The kitchen counter? Fur. My mouth? Fur. I hate it here.

I sewed one part wrong, of course. As you do. And had to tear it apart. Which. Is a lot easier to tear hand sewing off than machine sewing ill tell you that much.

Loose fit before trimming the seam allowances and before adding the beak fur.

But I couldnt stick it to the mask just yet until I had the rest of it figured. I did paint the inside bottom beak before, but it was too dark for my liking, so I repainted it real quick.

That and it was time to add and glue on the tongue too.

With that I also had a problem of being able to see the inside of my mouth way too easily because of the way the hinge is made. Most fursuit head have mouth opening right at the front, the beak however opens at the cheeks. And i couldnt just stick the fabric all the way because then the beak would never be able to open. I had to figure out some sort of membrane to block the sides of. So i grabbed aome left over stretchy velvet from the gloves and glied that fucker on

It covers the hing and springs too. Less likely to see my mouth that way.

Now it was time for sticking. And honestly the next image cracks me the hell up.

Me after 5 pints of whiskey.

Anyway the gluing was not fun!!! Nerve wrecking and scary and the adrenaline is still with me hours afterwards. Heres before and after brushing the fur once it was glued on.

Today was belt buckling day!

My mother gave me these shoes after lamenting how broken and worn out the elastic is on the heel. I needed some kind of pirate boots so I decided to take them even though theyre too big on me (itll be FINE)

So to figure out how to address the heel elastic problem i decided to same fucking and just cover that shit up. Found these two thick fake leather belts for like 2 bucks each which honestly was a perfect score.

Ending up cutting and measuring pretty well on the first time! The only problem was making holes. I had leather needles but uhm. That wasnt enough. So i figure out a makeshit setup....

Just hammering that shit in with a cotton needle. And listen i TRIED to find proper leather hole making tools but unfortunately my country SUCKS and they dont exist. Anyway.

Belts!!

It is 5 days before the deadline. I should be packing shit up really before I travel 7000km across the atlantic ocean.

Yet here we are. At last. The last few things.

Last time we left off we were gassing our family with spray paint fumes. It is -checks watch- 6 days later and the room still smells like fumes.

But lets not despair. I had both sides spray painted black and i didbt even have to go in to touch up the edges since it absorbed a fair amount of paint there! Gnarly.

It was time to paint. I got the most expensive tub of paint ive ever purchased in my life but its SO vibrant and so glittery you know what i dont even regret it considering im a cheapskate. I planned to do it in 4 different coats.

Coat one: a darker shiny as the base.

Looking pretty good. A nice dark fading into light.

Second coat: brighter blue

Third coat: bright green is spots only

Fourth coat: black along the stem and some pure unmixed metallic blue very sparingly around the shiniest areas

And voila!

Crow feathers are only shiny on one side. So I didnt have to worry about doing this for both sides thankfully. I did do a deep dark blue on the underside of some larger feathers for texture though.

Now to make the tail.

It was pretty straightforward. Nothing special was done with it. I measured an elastic band around my waist and sewed it up. Then stuck the feathers how I wanted.

Using some left over foam I constructed the base of the tail the feathers will stick only. Now even though the feathers ARE quite light, i wanted to make sure i can pose the base up or down just in case the tail went flat against my ass and id be kicking it with my feet. So this called for another wire action.

The foam has a back and top glued together so the wire cant escape. After that it was a matter of sewing the foam to the elastic, then gluing on the fur and sewing the top to the elastic again, and the sides so the foam doesnt peek out.

Look at that pretty tail wont ya

Onto the wings!!!

If you saw my previous post you probably already know i wasnt doing this part with hot glue. Its easy to tear off hot glue from fabric if you pull hard enough. Whats NOT easy to tear off is superglue though. So i wrapped my arm around in kitchen papertowels and some masking tape (for extra defense points) and honestly that was probably too much. But it worked!

Layer 1 (Primaries) ^

The first layer is glued only to the fabric . This ensures that the big feathers can move around with my wrist and hand naturally without catching to the other feathers. Layer 2 (primary/secondary coverts) is stuck to their respective feathers only. For further movement. They do overlap the primaries though. Because theyre stuck onto the primaries, the above view is not pretty. This is where layer 3 (alula+median coverts) come in to play. These are stuck to both fabric, the edge of primaries, and the tops of coverts. This completely blends the feathers into the fabric as natural.

The we just put the claws on and voila!! (My fingertips were covered in masking tape dw)

Pretty straight forward just time consuming in between waits for the glue to bond.

I DID however, forget to put on my paper guard on when i put on the second glove. It did not hurt. Then i did again after putting an extra feather onto the first glove. That one hurt.

But!!! Theyre done!!

This concludes every single part of the costume FINISHED. 5 days before the deadline.

This has been a fucking JOURNEY and yall are insane for listening to me ramble.

Day 2 on the boots! Instead of flipping between tasks I decided to just stay and finish at least one part completely. This is where were starting today. The goal is to make flipped tops to really add to the proper leather look.

Painstakingly measured out with some paper for a pattern and then got to cutting the same leather that I used for the pouch earlier. Its thick and is pretty close colour wise to the boots.

Once again I immediately ran into the problem of 'oh god leather is so hard to sew threw why do I continue to torture myself. After 2.5 hours of sewing I got both of boots done.

I thought the bare end was a little empty. Originally I was going to add the same tan thong I had left over from the bag, but there was only enough for one boot. So for now its just thicker thread. Maybe ill find a thong locally or edit it another time.

But still the leather is off colourwise. You can see how the boot is lighter everywhere but the stitches so time to put that into action and paint this bad boy.

The results?

Three layers of generous paint and I think we got ourselves a winner!! VERY happy how these came out after all the glove failures.

I also started painting the eyes on buckram(?) that I found on complete accident and thought I was doomed (thankfully i was lucky this one time!)

The eye frame was previously white which I spray painted to keep to the dark pallete.