You may recall a couple years ago, the girls were yellow minions from the movie Despicable Me. Well, the minion loving hasn’t stopped at our house, and since Despicable Me 2 came out, the girls have been determined to be purple minions this year.
After all the stress and problems I had making last year’s costumes, I was all for doing something that was simple and did not involve a ton of sewing on my part! This picture is what I had to go off of at the time because the girls thought they were so funny!
I was happy that we were able to “upcycle” some of the costumes, but to my chagrin, these costumes didn’t come together as easy as I would have hoped. But in the end, they loved them and that’s all that mattered. We used the same glasses/goggles we had from 2011 so that worked great, and we reused their black gloves as well.
Thankfully I had left over fabric from when I’d made the overalls in 2011, because Goose had grown so much, there was no way her overalls fit anymore. I sewed her a new pair, and the other two, just used the next size up that we already had. I had to wash them in black Rit dye to turn them grayish-black to match. They never did get as black as I would have hoped, but it worked. I found the logo for “El Macho” and printed it on my printer on sticker paper. I just stuck the logo to the little pocket on their overalls and we were set.
The next obstacle was the purple sweatshirts. I’d hoped to dye their yellow ones purple, but there was no way those bright yellow sweatshirts were going to turn another color. Then the problem arose that there were no kid hoodies or sweatshirts in a dark purple. So after a forever long hunt for the right color purple, I ended out having to but them the smallest women’s sweatshirts I could find. They obviously were a bit big for the youngest 2, but we made due.
For the hats, I bought a pair of purple sweat pants in that same purple, and just made a quick hat that fit their head. Using the legs of the sweatpants made it fairly easy because there was minimal sewing. I bought purple curling ribbon that was fairly wide and sewed it onto the top of the hats. Then my mom had a ribbon curler/shredder thing that I ran down all the strips of ribbon to make it look a bit more like minion hair. I’d wanted to use purple yarn and make it all frayed and frizzy, but that would have taken me a lot more time (of which I did not have!).
Their teeth were cut out of that thin craft foam that is so popular these days. I bought a sheet of it and we cut out jagged teeth shapes as they thought looked best. We hot glued them onto black pipe cleaner and then suspended the pipe cleaner with clear fishing line from their glasses. That way their teeth hung out in front of their face and didn’t rub their purple make-up off.
Here they are trying to act like the evil scary minions that they should have been! The sad part about these costumes, was that the movie hadn’t been out overly long, so unless people had seen the movie, they didn’t really get what they were trying to be. Whereas, with the yellow minions in 2011 no matter where we went people were stopping them and getting all excited about “the minions!” If we would have waited a year things probably would have been different! But over all, they were a hit with the girls and that was the goal!
If you want to see more pictures of our yellow minion costumes, click here.
