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Seamstress finds furry niche
greenreaper on Flayrah News)
Here is an article dated October 14, in The New Zealand Herald. It is comprised of an interview with local fursuit maker Juliet "Sparky" Johnston (who makes 'suits under the label "Sparky Can Do!").
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11139791
Seamstress finds furry niche
By Nathan Crombie nathan.crombie@age.co.nz - WAIRARAPA TIMES-AGE
7:40 PM Monday Oct 14, 2013
Sparky was a little white fox terrier that Juliet Johnston as a kid loved to dress in gangster hoodies, tuxedoes and cowboy suits she had hand sewn and rhinestoned herself.
Juliet, 22, persisted with her gift for anthropomorphic costumery and close to three years ago began a supremely unusual livelihood infusing animal characters with broad splashes of humanity, manufacturing what are known as fursuits. The home-schooled entrepreneur, who was born in California and speaks with an American accent, founded a costume manufacturing business called Sparky Can Do! and is known online as Sparky, of course.
An industrial sewing machine dominates a converted bedroom in the home she shares with husband Bryce and it is there among the debris of carved foam and faux fur offcuts that griffins, anime otters or tigers are born and where rams, wolves, dinosaurs and bunnies first walk upright into the world.
She officially describes herself as a seamstress who creates specialised costumes, including the fursuits that are a physical expression of "fursonas" that self-titled furries manifest when populating their online and real-time world known as the furry fandom.
Some furries wear their suits to conventions, charity and role-playing events and some turn their sub-cultural penchant into passion, using the suits for sexual gratification, Juliet said.
According to Wikipedia, the term "yiff" most commonly refers to sexual activity or sexual material within the fandom, which is comprised mostly of males. The sexualisation of furry characters had polarised the sub-culture and while some were sexually motivated, the majority "took a negative stance" towards the fetishist few.
"Tread lightly. It's called the furry community and there's a dark side and a normal side, just like any community. It's like the pervert side of the internet, you know, it's a fetish for some people."
A partial costume comprising a wolf head and claws was her first attempt at a fursuit, she said, when she and a friend started dabbling, at the age of about 16, with the specialised art form. The fursuits she offers today have a starting price of $2000 each and her onesies, which are far simpler but just as brightly-hued one-piece costumes, start at $500 apiece.
The suits are crafted from foam padding, polyfilla and faux fur and vinyl and while partial fursuits feature only feet, claws and a head, the complete fursuits incorporate a head with articulated jaw, body, hands, feet and occasionally a tail.
They usually take a fortnight of up to 10-hour working days to complete although more padding and consequently more time is demanded when clients want specialised appendages or drop crotch designs.
Juliet has manufactured up to 70 fursuits and onesies and sells almost exclusively to clients in North America, Switzerland, Japan and Australia.
Anthrocon, held in Pittsburgh, is one of the largest annual furry conventions in the world, attracting up to 4000 furries every year. Juliet would happily rub shaggy shoulders with her clientele at the event, she said, and plans to make a trip to the annual bash within the next two years.
Juliet was working at The Escarpment vineyard in Martinborough when she collided online with the furry subculture, and her unique skill base and creative temperament came out to play.
"I found my niche market when I was introduced to the furry community. I already liked making costumes as a kid, you know, I'd make really weird costumes when I was 12 for Halloween or to go to Armageddon. Then I fell in with the furries and they had fursuits.
"I thought, hey, I can make these. I was working all year round at the vineyard but there's three months where you have no work and I thought I'd try making costumes. I made three fursuits in a couple of months and tried them online and they actually sold really well. I made a dog and a cat and a rabbit. People seemed to like my style, so I took on a few commissions and really, the work started from there. Right now I'm working on two suits and I have 15 commissions lined up and ready to go.
"I make fursuits but I also make other sorts of costume as well, like mascots and onesies. Whatever people want and wherever they are."
She had manufactured a Penguin mascot suit for the Junior Neighbourhood Support group in Wairarapa, which was spookily dubbed Sparky in an inter-school naming rights contest, and this year also completed her second World of Wearable Arts costume - a dinosaur/dragon named AWOL - after first stalking the WOW catwalk in 2011 with a creature called Toxic Plush.
Juliet's future in costumery is widening, she said, and includes the possibility of a switch to more realism in the costumes she creates, digital art, or costume manufacturing for stage or film.
Her clearest and dearest ambition is to construct a latex raptor suit with a view to moving into manufacturing more realistic dinosaur costumes. The raptor suit she has already envisaged would demand the wearer to be on stilts, she said.
"I've had a look at WETA (Studios in Wellington). It was great - looks like a lot of fun. But I've just started getting into resins and casting and being able to make my own moulds, so I'm happy where I am for now," she said.
"At the moment it's just sort of easier to make costumes which are just sewing and foam. I do make my own clothes too when I get the time, and I'd love to get more into drawing and painting and art. I'm getting into digital drawing as well.
"That was where I first started I guess, drawing with a pencil.
"Because you pretty much need that talent, you need to be able to draw and understand how things work that way before you can start making three dimensional costumes. It makes it so much easier to picture what you want in your head before you carve it out of foam.
"I have been thinking I might want to get out of the furry side some time and get into making latex dinosaurs instead, that actually look like dinosaurs. I'd love to get into that.
"I'll make myself one first and see how hard it is and how it goes. If people like it, that could be a go. But I can see them taking 10 weeks not two to make and they would cost quite a bit more.
"Maybe movie industry quality stuff even, so yeah, I'll have to see where that takes me."
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Furry As A Queer Identity
LGBT stands for two things: firstly, a delicious sandwich (lettuce, guacamole, bacon & tomato); secondly a group of people who don’t easily fit into a heterosexual, binary gendered world.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are lumped together into LGBT mostly for convenience. The four groups are discriminated against in a similar way and the political action required for equality are much the same. LGBT people can generally be classified as being ‘queer’ which roughly means that they diverge from a traditional sexual or gender identity.
Of course, there are plenty of people who diverge from a traditional sexual or gender paradigm who are neither L, G, B or T. And so we can continually add letters to LGBT until it spells something awesome like TERABULGE, or we can toss a catch-all Q to give us LGBTQ, an acronym which is gaining traction.
We furries are already accepted within the LGBT community to a large extent, which is at least partly due to our own gender and sexual diversity. But I think that there is a strong argument that the entirety of furry can be recognized as a queer identity, a Q, including the 30% or so (according to the 2012 Furrypoll) of us that are heterosexual and cis-gendered.
Before I go any further, I want to talk about my language and nomenclature. The English language implicitly classifies people by gender, as denoted by gender pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’. The limitations of these pronouns aren’t limited to the genderqueer; they also reinforce an assumption of heterosexuality. (As anyone who has ever written gay pornography can attest, we don’t have an elegant way of making a distinction between ‘him’ and ‘him’.) The word pair of his/hers, he/she are perfect for talking about a heterosexual couple, and the elegance and utility of these terms reinforces the idea that a couple is comprised of one member of each gender.
The LGBT community has language problems too. When LGBT issues started to come to the fore, they were called gay issues. After some time, the group started to be called ‘gays and lesbians’, which grew into to LGB, and more recently to LGBT. The problem is that all these terms are a ‘whitelist’: they require us to list the identities that diverge from ‘normal’. We’d be far better off with a term that meant ‘everyone who isn’t straight and cis-gendered’, but we don’t have one in wide circulation.
Even the term LGBT doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, because T (transgendered) is out of place. The other three terms refer to sexual orientation, and many people who are T are also L, G, or B. And if we use LGBTQ, then surely the LGBT become redundant, as they are all Q in their own way.
So, some definitions: I’m going to use LGBT as my catch-all, and it’s intended to include I (intersex), A (asexual), H (hijra), P (pansexual), and who ever else wants to come along for the ride. Further along, I’m also going to include zoophiles and furries.My usage of LGBT means ‘queer’, but without the (slightly archaic) offensive connotations.
Despite the apparently fundamental difference between those with a divergent sexual orientation (LGB), and those with a divergent gender identity (T), all LGBT people suffer from the same prejudice. They all suffer because they are subverting traditional ideas of gender.
The yin-yang dichotomy of masculinity and femininity suggests that there is a strong, active, lead role (the man) and a weak, passive, following role (the woman). This totally unfair basis makes up the foundation of most societies around the world, and it creates a reality where the men are the presumptive leaders. It’s the foundation of sexism.
Any man or woman who breaks the stereotype of their gender can be subject to discrimination, because they challenge this patriarchal version of reality. So women who excel in sports or business may be thought of as ‘butch’, and men who excel in the arts may be thought of as ‘girly’.
Homosexual activity challenges gender stereotypes, in part because of the sex act itself. A patriarchal society demands male and female roles, which can’t work when sex involves two members of the same gender. So lesbians may be seen as ‘less feminine’ and gay men seen as ‘less masculine’.
The implied requirement for gender roles persists even in LGBT circles, especially with gay sex, where the penetrative role is ‘dominant’ and the receptive role is ‘submissive’. The idea that a gay men must choose a role, where the ‘top’ should be masculine, and the ‘bottom’ should be effeminate is no longer the default, it’s more ‘opt-in’ nowadays. And while nominally dominant/submissive roles in gay sex are enjoyed by furry wolves/foxes everywhere, we (happily) live in a world where all sex must be consensual, and any situation where one party is literally all-dominant is rape.
There are plenty of artefacts of the stigmatization of gay sex. In Iran, for example, someone convicted of receptive gay sex is sentenced to death, whereas someone convicted of penetrative gay sex will receive a less severe punishment. In more enlightened society, gay men entering their compulsory military service in Singapore will be asked whether they engage in penetrative or receptive gay sex, with the receptive parties being given more feminine duties. And the idea that a gay couple has a nominal ‘man’ and ‘woman’ still persists all around the world.
Consider a male NBA player, who comes out as gay. He’ll be big news. Whereas a lesbian WNBA player will be met with yawns. Each player is meeting prejudice when he/she challenges the gender stereotype: the man when it’s revealed that he’s gay; the women when it’s revealed that she plays basketball. Make no mistake; sexism is at the heart of much of the prejudice towards LGBT people. Challenging traditional gender boundaries is taboo.
The species boundary is another great taboo. I’ve written about zoophiles here on [a][s] before and I know that it’s a sensitive topic. If you are anti-zoophile, or think that zoophilia is wrong, or that zoophilia is irrelevant to furry, then I strongly suggest that you read my previous articles (here, here, and here) before you read further. I don’t want to repeat myself here, but suffice to say that I think that zoophiles are subject to unfair discrimination comparable to that of gay men in 1950s. (And, no, I am not a zoophile myself.)
Zoophiles are discriminated against because they cross the species boundary. We live in a world where a strong line is drawn between ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, despite the fact that humans are also animals. We care for human life; we eat animals. Human suffering matters a lot; animal suffering matters less.
We furries are crossing the species barrier as well. We, or at least those of us who have a strong furry identity, like to think of ourselves as a hybrid of human and non-human—as animal-people. We do our best to bring our animal-people into the real world: with art, with fursuits, with the way we interact, and with our sexuality. Furry isn’t about sex, but sexuality can be a big part of identity. And so sex plays an important part in our furry experience.
It’s common for people with a passing awareness of furry to be slightly freaked out by the sexual nature of it all. Some members of sci-fi and related fandoms find the sexual component to be repugnant, and this attitude leaked into some of the furry media coverage around the turn of the century, back when furry was more closely aligned with fandom. People react strongly to the sexual component of furry because we are blurring the species boundary: the idea of a Thundercats orgy garners much the same reaction (from anti-furries) as the idea of a Bert/Ernie love-in (from homophobes).
We furries are queer: we diverge from the traditional species paradigm. We belong with the LGBT. Our zoophile brothers and sisters (and Ts) belong there as well. We’re all different, but we suffer from the same source of discrimination: we all cross, in one way or another, a societal boundary that is arbitrarily taboo.
Nowadays, furries are regular and long-time participants in Gay Pride events in San Francisco, Sydney, and elsewhere around the world. Our representation at these events should not be only those of us who are LGBT: we should participate because we want to publicly express and celebrate our queerness—our furry identity—regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Review: ‘What Happens Next’, edited by Fred Patten
Furry Race mods for Fallout 3?
So, I recently got my hands on Furblivion (Furoblivion? I don't know), and it made me wonder. Is there anything similar to that for Fallout 3?
Ive found RocketLombax Anthro Races, but I'm not sure if that is exactly what I am looking for.
Anything you guys can provide is welcomed, so long as it adds to the discussion.
submitted by thetracker3[link] [7 comments]
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