Minion Gone Wild: Homemade Despicable Me Purple Minion Costume

After last year’s extravagant robot costume (and lots of whining, tears and bumping into things) I vowed I would never again make my poor son wear another costume that gave him limited sight or mobility.Then Despicable Me 2 came out in theaters and both our minds were changed. He loved the idea of being a cute yellow minion but when he set eyes on those screaming, spitting purple minions he couldn’t wait to throw on a costume and get into character! Problem #1: The only purple minion costumes out there for sale were sad looking and poorly made. Since we don’t do costumes half way in our house I promised I’d make him the best evil minion yet. So I sat out doing research. Problem #2: I could only find ONE other homemade purple minion costume online to try and pattern mine after (and it wasn’t pretty lol). So it looked like I was gonna have to go at this thing alone and wing it. Definitely something I do a lot. I love diy projects but am too cheap to pay for instructions so I do tons of trial and error. Now most people making the yellow minions suggested you use a trash can but since I’m cheap (as I said earlier) I refused to pay $20 for a round top trash can. So I started brain storming and googling again and found someone who mentioned using a camping mat as a form for a costume. After buying it I measured my son and created a tube shape that went around him to create his body or head. It was gonna take 2 mats. I pulled out the old trusty duct tape and went to town. (I guess I should mention that usually the hot glue gun is my best friend but in this case using it just angered the mat and made it melt lol.) Next I started attempting to create a round top by cutting triangles out and gathering the foam with punched holes and thin yarn. Yeah that didn’t turn out pretty! Think Dan Aykroyd in 1993s Coneheads lol. With lots of bad thoughts toward the foam and a bunch of bending and more duct tape of course I was able to maneuver the top to look more dome like. This left a hole in the top of the head but as we know from the pictures the purple minions have tons of crazy awesome wild purple hair so I knew the hole would be covered. After making a second tube for his body I took some cheap quilt batting and purple fleece and cover both pieces completely. Again lots of duct tape and even a little hot glue! My minion was finally coming into sight! I covered some jaged shapped foam with fleece and create some teeth to create a mouth. The next hurtle to overcome was cutting holes through the fabric and foam for the eye/goggle hole and arm holes. I cursed myself immediately realizing it would have been much easier to do this before the fabric was in place. Ah the beauty of trial and error. I was able to cut the holes and secure any hanging fabric to the inside of the tube. The goggle was the next section of the costume. I figured out at this point that if I turned my hot glue gun’s temp down I could use it on the foam with out coming up with an angry melty foamy mess. So after creating a nice round shape with more camping mat foam I covered the entire goggle with sparkly foam from the craft section. I was even able to add detailed rivits with some sparkly silver balls I took off of a Christmas floral pick. After the goggle I moved on to the arms. They were simple enough. While looking at a picture of a purple minion I noticed they have super long skinny arms that drag the ground. Since my son is a chunky monkey and has normal size arms I decided we would have to improvise. I grabbed some matching purple fleece and sewed a long skinny tube to create the arms. Stuffing black gloves with batting and securing them with black electrical tape to the arms gave me just the look I needed. Again I pulled out the glue gun and glued the arms to the body. After this I moved on to the overalls. Since the only ventilation he would have was the eye hole I chose to make faux overalls to create air flow. Easy as pie I wrapped black felt around him (gluing as I went) and created the garment. I also took this time to cut a M for El Macho to put on his overalls. Then I glued some velcro strips on the tops over the body tube and on the bottom of the head tube so we could pull his head off for air flow if needed. Lastly was the hair. Oh shoot me now the hair! Lol. Because I’ve already written a book and because I’m pretty sure I blacked out from stress about a hundred and eighty times while trying to create the perfect minion fro I’ll try to explain this as easy as possible. I found what I thought would be easy yarn to work with and latch hooked about 100 pieces to a grid. I then secured the grid to the foam with yarn. After pulling the hair through the hole on the top of the head I started to rat and fray the yarn. Let me stop here and tell you this took FOREVER!! Seriously I cried and gave up a billion times. My wonderful husband then pointed out there are a trillion different evil minions in the movie and they all have unique crazy hair so if I couldn’t get it just right it would be our own unique minion. That calmed me and helped me to create what you see here. I bought some Aqua Net and went to town on that hair like an old lady on Sunday! This was my favorite part. :) Once all that mess was done we had a costume! Paired with black shoes and black pants my little minion was ready for our fall festivals and carnivals. He couldn’t see very well to walk so we had to hold his hands and guide him everywhere since his goggle only gave him limited vision. Also it looked like he was having a fit everytime he’d get an itch and had to pull his arm back inside to scratch his face. Everyone thought that was hilarious because he would start shaking and flopping around. Also the wind made sure every 20mins to pick up one side of his hair and give him a killer Donald Trump comb over! That made for tons of giggles. I played beauty shop repeatedly Halloween night! We were literally stopped every few mins by people asking for pictures with him or trying to figure out who was inside. I’d say it was a major hit! To top it off we made daddy a quick scarf and colored his eye brows to complete the costume with a Gru!

Related costumes:

Leave a Comment Cancel reply