Nic's Fursuit Page -- Construction Details

First and foremost, I worried about the tail. The tail was designed to hang limp (since I didn't want to deal with the complexity of an internal skeleton on my first full furry costume). Yet I wanted to tail to be strong enough that it wouldn't be damaged or disconnected if it got snagged or pulled.

To accomplish this, I used rock-climbing webbing in the tail. The webbing is a lightweight nylon weave that has almost no stretch (lengthwise), yet supports more than my bodyweight on a half-inch-wide strip. Good stuff! :) I sewed some of this webbing down the length of the tail's underseam. I then made a harness from some wider pieces of webbing that I could wear around my waist, under the costume's bodysuit. This is all shown in the image at left.

The tail was constructed of rings of felt sewn inside of one another. I stitched a thin strip of dark brown FunFur into each seam, thus creating the appearance of hairs between the tail's rings. To give the tail a more realistic appearance, the felt segments were given an airbrushed gradient of dirty brown. This kept the felt from appearing too artificially pink.
The bodysuit was built on a modified unitard, as mentioned in the previous document. Foam was added around the joints to allow flexibility; the fur has little to no stretch, so the foam additions provide the necessary compression zones that allow the costume to bend and flex properly. The foam buildup also serves to modify the shape of the body. I raised the apparent shoulders a little and also did quite a bit of work to flute my spine into the tail (which is held away from my rear by the foam buildup).

The foam was applied directly to the bodysuit using a hot glue gun and a lot of courage. :) In a few places, a few stitches were added as reinforcement. This was largely unecessary, as the fur layer of the finished costume prevents the foam from shifting position at all.