Alt's suit

I'm currently working on making a partial fursuit for Alt. It's still a work in progress, photos to come!

The furs I used throughout the suit are the Periwinkle and Ivory shag fur from FursuitSupplies, and the fabric for the paw pads was Pumpkin Minky Solid Cuddle from Shannon Fabrics (I just bought it on Amazon). The vast majority of the sewing was done by hand: the only parts that I used a sewing machine for was the appliqué of the paw pads on the hand paws and feet paws. I had essentially zero sewing experience before I started making this fursuit, so it was certainly a learning experience, albeit a very fun one.

Sewing-only parts

Hand paws

I initially used the free puffy paw pattern by Curlworks but either this pattern is just not what I was expecting or I got the scaling wrong: the paws are absolutely enormous, even more than I expected for puffy paws. Even using the included padding pillows, it's crazy loose.

For version 2, I switched to this pattern by LobitoWorks, which produced paws much closer to what I wanted.

Feet paws

I used this pattern by SpiltGrapeSoda. It worked quite nice! The only issue I had was my own fault: I couldn't find quilted broadcloth anywhere local, so I just used some cheap poly/cotton fabric that I thought would be close enough... not realizing that broadcloth isn't stretchy. So it feels pretty odd to wear, but it works nice enough.

I also modded the pattern to add swappable paw bottoms! I made indoor bottoms with paw pads, and outdoor bottoms with a tough shoe rubber bottom. This was a pretty simple change to make: rather than using 1" EVA foam like the pattern calls for, I used 2 layers of 1cm foam: 1 piece is glued to the fur like in the pattern, and the other piece is velcro'd the first. This bottom piece has either the rubber pad on it for an outdoor bottom or the pattern's original fur bottom for the indoor bottoms.

Tail

This part's pretty simple. I used this deer/bunny tail pattern by MugiwaraCosplay. I did modify it a little bit to move the transition between the blue and white downward a bit.

As expected, this was by far the most difficult and complex part to make. I initially tried to design the entire head from scratch, but this went south pretty quickly. In the interest of getting this project done, I settled for using a preexisting design: the mk3 design by M16 Studios. For more flexibility in terms of graphics, I also used the alternate front frame that allows mounting larger 64x32px displays.

Electronics

For the LED matrix panels I used these ones from Waveshare (I just bought them on Amazon though). These panels use a weird control protocol called HUB75, so to interface with them I used a SmartLED board, which is just a shield for a standard Teensy 4 microcontroller that lets you drive HUB75 panels. The neat thing about these panels is that you can daisy-chain them to make arbitrarily large displays! My two 64x32 panels are chained together into a single 128x32 display.