Lion Cosplay: Making a giant fluffy mane

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I am a big fan of Steven Universe. Generally speaking there is a correlation between characters I cosplay and the media I am a fan of, in this case I might go so far as to say correlation does actually imply causation. Steven Universe has such a broad diversity of female characters that are strong, flawed, kind, loving, badass, and emotionally complex – so of course when I picked one to cosplay I went for the fluffy pink lion…

If you too wish to be a walking pillow and blanket, fondly dubbed the slanket or billow, then look no further than this cosplay breakdown.

Materials wise I didn’t need all that much:

• Scrap material for a mock up.
• Dark pink fleece, I picked mine up at Joann (medium pink anti-pill fleece)
• Long pile faux fur, I found mine at Mendel’s in San Francisco, conveniently they also have an online store (mongolian shag in light pink)
• Stuffing (like for pillows or plushies)
• Scraps of brown felt
• zipper (as long as you can find!)
• Elastic
• Thread to match

The body of the cosplay is pretty simple, I based it off a Kigurumi/Onesie pattern. I had two main modifications from the instructables pattern:

1. Instead of having a zipper down the center front, I placed the zipper on the crotch seam so it more or less runs from knee to knee. This way I didn’t have to deal with a zipper and attaching the mane at the collar, as well as giving a cleaner look to the front – it does make getting in and out pretty funny.
2. For the sleeves I extended the length so they would reach over my fingers and then curved the end and sewed them together, leaving a little gap in the seam so I can get my hands out. I then appliqued circles of brown felt for paws.

For my feet I found a pair of pink fluffy slippers at target by chance, that happened to match the fleece color pretty well!

Mane

Lion is all about the mane, and I wanted mine to be as floofy as possible. I had never made any sort of plush before, so to start I made a small felt mock up to get an idea of the piece shapes and structure.

The pieces for the front of the mane can be seen below. The overall dimensions are around 45 inches across and 55 inches long, with the hole for the hood being 10 inches across and 12 inches tall. I split the piece into four sections so I could keep the pile on the faux fur going in the same direction, I wanted it all to be moving from the center to the tips.

The back section pieces are below. These are based on smaller versions of the front section and cut into more sections in order to get the whole mane to pull back wards (giving in the sort of flow that it has in the cartoon), otherwise it just stuck up as a weird pink star thing. Note there is no bottom point to the back sections. The bottom point is only on the front and I turned this into my mane pocket!

The construction was weird, and involved a lot of guesswork. The assembled the front pieces and the back pieces and then sewed the front to the back. This gave me a pocket with a hole in it. The hood of the onesie was already attached to the body so I then sewed the mane to the hood and body. Basically this was attached mostly to the hood and partly to the front of the body to create the circle. I then sewed the back of the front points pocket (the lining for the pocket was added later with hand stitching). At this point I stuffed the mane with as much stuffing seemed reasonable to carry on one’s head.

With the mane stuffed and attached I hand stitched the back of the mane closed to the back of the body. I also made some hand stitched adjustments, tacking parts of the points down and back to create more flow. I also added the lining to the front pocket creating a pouch for me to carry fun things like a VHS tape for Steven!

Make-Up

I painted my face to be lionesque. I mostly looked at a bunch of google images of lion make-up and made my own thing. Mostly pink eyebrows and eye makeup, thick cat like eyeliner and coloring my nose! The teeth were the werewolf set from scarecrow that I already had for my Cane cosplay.