So after overcoming a fairly serious thumb injury and making the life-changing decision to quit my last job, I finally finished Rarity's head (and by finally finished I mean the head's been finished for a week, I've just been dealing with her mane up until last night). Long synthetic hair is a nightmare to deal with. I spent way too long trying to get her mane the way it is in the show, and I just couldn't get it right. No matter what I tried I couldn't get the hair to make one large curl, so in the end I just took a regular curling iron and went at it. I'll have to brush and re-curl it before every use (you can see how messy it got after just one day), so that'll be mildly annoying, but not too bad since it only takes about half an hour. Even though I'm still disappointed I couldn't get it how I want, I still think it looks okay.

Moving on from her mane, while the head does have some other problems, I'm just happy at how much I improved compared to my last head (which I will not show). I still have problems with mouths, but I did a hell of a lot better this time around. There are also visible gaps in the edges of the eyes where the plastic meets the foam, but I think I can find a way around that next time. And I also want to switch to 3D printing once I get enough money, which would eliminate that problem all together.

And, of course, nearly everything is magnetic. Her swappable eyelids for different expressions, her mane (both front and rear sections), and even her horn are removable. I would have done her ears as well (for transportation purposes), but the strength of magnet needed to hold them on properly through the foam and fur would make the head way too heavy. Not to mention they're $40 a pair, and I'd need at least four magnets per ear for that.

And they're not pictured, but I have a pair of removable 40x20mm fans hooked up to a 3000 mAh battery the size of a credit card and width of a smartphone (no, I'm not exaggerating. It's tiny and weighs next to nothing). Everything fits inside the head and the battery can last for almost ten hours, so I think that it's much preferable over my last setup that had the wires for all six fans in the suit running to one battery bank. Sure, that one may have enough capacity to run every fan for 24 hours, but that's overkill, and it's rather inconvenient to have wires running all over the inside of the suit.

Here are some pictures.

Since the eyes are so massive, vision is about as good as it gets in a fursuit. That also helps ventilation along, which is also really good, given that there's two 40mm fans in the head - one that draws fresh air in through the mouth, and another that exhausts hot hair out in front of the ear (the vent is hidden by her mane. It's very difficult to see, but it still draws a lot of the heat from inside the head).

Overall I'm happy with the results, given my experience level. I've definitely improved a lot since my last head, and that's good enough for me. Now on to the body suit. I worked on that all day today, and let me tell you ponysuits are so much more complicated than fursuits, even digisuits. The legs aren't too difficult, but you have to pad the arms if you want the suit to look good, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. Me wanting to add dual 80mm fans to each arm doesn't make it any easier. But still, I think I've got some good progress going, so we'll see how it turns out in the end.