It's fall. Time to seriously start working on my fursuit again.

Last year I had Big Plans. I was planning on making a dragon fursuit, complete with wings and everything. But as the saying goes, the higher you set your goals the farther you fall when you fail to meet them (or something like that).

The dragon was my first fursuit project. I made plans in my head while driving to and from work. I made sketches and bought materials and everything. But it just didn't happen. I completed the head in time for Halloween last year, and that's all I ever did.

This begs the question: Why am I doing this? There are two main reasons. First, I love costumes. In playing a character that is not you, you can be yourself more. (Yes, I know that makes no sense.) Second, I like making things. It's fun.

And there it is. (Yes, that's me in that head.) Finished, but without a body. Somehow, the image I had in my head when I started the project did not match what I actually made. It just looks... wrong. And being the quitter that I am, I quit.

I might try again on the dragon later, but I aimed too high. So I moved on to a second project: a unicorn.

I'm aiming quite a bit lower this time. Instead of doing a full body fursuit, I'm just making a head, hands, feet and a tail. The rest will be a regular "person" costume of a Scottish lass. But once again I'm running into problems.

You see, making the dragon's head was pretty easy. After all, there's no set way that a dragon should look. (Although I now realize that instead of making "ears" I should had gone with horns.) Unicorns are much harder because everyone knows what a unicorn looks like. Like horses with a horn, right? But that's not even the hard part.

Horse's heads are very different from ours structurally. Specifically, their eyes are on the sides of their heads, rather than in the front. And I need to be able to see. Plus, I'm finding it difficult to design a realistic looking muzzle.

I have the understructure of the head almost finished, and I've started planning on what "skin" pattern will look best. I want to minimize seams. I'm using broadcloth to pattern out what pieces I'll need, but I keep running into problems. With that damn muzzle.

Ideally, I should be able to see out of the end of the muzzle. The dragon's mouth was open, so I can just see out the eyes (for where I'm going) and out the mouth (for where I'm putting my feet). But I'm having enough problems with the muzzle, and I don't want to add the additional "open mouth" problem to everything.

I've been seriously considering just trashing the understructure that I have right now and starting over. Or maybe just redoing a part of it.

Or maybe I'm just stalling because I'm stuck.

I think the most annoying part of it is that I'm so afraid of making a mistake, I just sit on what I've done so far. "Oooh, this looks pretty good. Don't want to mess it up any." And so nothing gets done.

My biggest fear is really obvious seams. On most fursuits, the fur is long enough to cover up any seams that might appear. But I'm using a very short napped fur, almost a kind of felt. In the design that I'm thinking of now, the main seams will be under the eyes, and just behind the nostrils.

I suppose that if I'm terribly unhappy with the seams I can always cover them up with a bridle or something. But I don't want to play a "tamed" unicorn.

Whatever. I have to go and think about horse muzzles now.