Our Awesome Halloween Costumes and How I Made Them

There we are: Gru and a minion
How did we do it? Here's how.
Gru's nose: take some foil and shape it into a nose, leaving a bit of an opening at the wider end to shape onto the person who's going to be wearing it. Then cover it in masking tape. Paint it to look like a nose! I bought skin colored paint and used it as base. Then I mixed a tiny bit of vermilion with the paint and sponged it on for a mottled effect. I also mixed some white with the base paint and sponged that on too. Here's the pictures!


Ok, so you can't see the mottling very good. Oh well. It's there and it looks good!
To finish Gru off, we bought Josh a big sweater and he padded himself up with 8 layers of shirts underneath. Then he borrowed my welding goggles (yes, I own welding goggles!) and put those on along with a scarf around his neck. Too bad he looked more like Dr. Horrible than Gru... we could have done without the welding goggles, but he wanted to wear them.

For a minion, we bought me a yellow shirt. It was rather large since the small and medium sizes were cleaned out here. I also bought a kids pair of jeans and a pair of yucky old suspenders that were made for your typical Idahoan potato farmer. Here's a picture:

I tried to put them on just to see how they worked and the little criss-crossy part in the back ended up being on top of my head.
I wanted to make suspenders that looked like overalls without being overalls. Why? First, it's not the 90's anymore. Even if I wanted to wear overalls, not even DI has them anymore. Second, overalls are not allowed on campus (along with flip-flops, capris and short skirts... but honestly, when would you ever want to wear those in Iceburg?). So I took the pair of jeans I bought and cut them into strips about 2 times the width of the suspenders like so:


Little kid jeans are only so long, so you have to cut out 4 strips. Then you take 2 strips and sew them together


And yes, I did have to do this all by hand since I don't have a sewing machine. It's definitely going on my Christmas list!
Next, pin and sew the strips to the width of the suspenders



Once you're done with that, you get to destroy the really icky suspenders!!! I cut all the metal pieces off and used them on the strips. First, you thread the adjuster part on, then the clip and then loop the end around and thread it through the adjuster one more time. Sorry, I don't have pictures because I was doing this project while listening to my teacher drone on about Galileo, Copernicus and other Renaissance scientists. But here's a finished side.

When both are done, put them on and adjust them. Then take them off and put them on backwards, criss-crossing them in front of you and pin it where they cross. Then sew that together and you have faux-overall suspenders!!
For the minion face, you just need yellow hairspray, yellow facepaint, and black and white face paint sticks. Draw like so



Happy Halloween!