Coolest Homemade Stewie Griffin Costume

This is what you need for the Stewie Griffin Costume:

– a pair of old tennis shoes
– oversized white sweats
– white long-sleeved t-shirt
– an extra white t-shirt (to make the “jumpsuit” straps)
– 2-inch foam (white)
– 3M™ FoamFast Spray Adhesive 74
– duct tape (white)
– Foamies
– RIT clothing dye (WINE and YELLOW)
– Spray paint (LIGHT BLUE and YELLOW-ish)
– pipe cleaners (black)
– lace (white)
– large doilies
– black Sharpie

Being a big fan of “Family Guy”, it only made sense to be someone from the show. Who else to be but Stewie!!

Being 6’ft tall with an 18-inch neck myself, the first challenge was to come up with a head whose size was relatively similar to that of Stewie’s and his 2ft toddler frame, not to mention figuring out how to make 3-dimensional football-shaped head from a 2-dimensional cartoon character. More on that later. First the easy part:

The CLOTHING was fairly simple. I’ve learned over my years of costume making that dyeing white clothes is the best route to go. Doing so allows for great color matching between 2 separate pieces of your costume (sweats and tshirt, in my case), not to mention a heavy dye job will give you that ultra-bright cartoony look I was going for.

I first dyed the sweats and the “extra” tshirt in a large pot of near-boiling water using Rit’s WINE color to my desired color. Because the original color was white, it didn’t take long for the deep bright red effect to come through. I then dyed the long-sleeved white shirt using RIT’s YELLOW (different batch of water, of course :-)). After the items dried, I cut the now-RED tshirt into straps for the jumpsuit and safety-pinned them to the now-red jumpsuit. The shoes was a simple light-blue color spray paint job :-)

And now the fun part…Stewie’s awfully big head!

Again, it took a lot of “how am I going to pull this off”, but then it came to me..

FOAM!!! BIG PIECES OF FOAM!!!!

I initially tried my neighborhood arts and craft store, but they didn’t have the size I needed, so I “Googled” nearby foam retailers and found one about 30 minutes away. I arrived with my printed pic of Stewie. After measuring my shoulder span and that of Stewie’s from the pic, we decided that a head 46-48 inches wide would be relative to Stewie’s head and my physique. I purchased two 48″ wide football-shaped pieces of foam (white…2-inches thick) and drove home, only to realize the 2 pieces alone would not give me the 3-dimensional look I needed. I went back to the foam retailer, measured the circumference of the entire “head”, and purchased a long 12-inch wide strip of foam to use for the head’s “DEPTH”.

I placed one football piece (the “front” of his face; face-down) on my dining room table and sprayed some “3M™ FoamFast Spray Adhesive 74” (Home Depot or similar outlets) around the back edges of the piece. I then took the strip piece of foam (KEEP IN MIND THAT THE 12-INCHES IS THE DISTANCE FROM THE FRONT OF YOUR FACE TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD…AGAIN, THIS IS THE DEPTH), sprayed along the THICKNESS edges of the strip with the adhesive, and stuck the two together, carefully lining up the edges of the strip around the circumference of the football piece (Was that confusing? In the end, you should have a big foam “bowl” that 48-inches across (point-to-point) that’s 12-inches deep). Can you guess where the second football piece goes? Exactly! Just spray some adhesive along the strip and around the edges of football piece, push them together, and you now have the back of Stewie’s head. For my own piece of mind, I also duct-taped all the pieces that were glued together.

For his eyes, I purchased a couple of large doilies for shaping purposes only. I used a pencil to draw circles where I wanted his eyes to be and only cut out a square hole in the middle of each eye for me to see out of. I then covered the holes with a couple of layers of white lace. I made the upper and lower eyelids with white Foamies (arts and craft stores), which covered up the glue holding the lace together. The ears were made out of pieces of duct tape folded to look like ears. I then spray painted the entire head a yellow-ish/brown-ish Stewie color (everything except the “whites” of his eyes”. Once it dried, I inserted black pipe cleaners to make the strands of hair. A black Sharpie was used to outline the foam eyelids and draw the pupils, eyebrows, nose, and lips.

Leftover foamies was used to make the jumpsuit buttons. I spray painted and wore some cheap white cotton gloves to match the skin tone of the head. Because the head was so big, I stuffed it with foam pieces and balanced it on my head so it wouldn’t wobble around so much.

I spent a total of approx. 10 hours (not counting overnight drying of dye and glue jobs) and and might have spent a little over $120 for everything (clothes, foam, dye, adhesive, etc). It was a lot of work , I got so many compliments on it, I would do it all over again if I had to.

I HOPE YOU FIND THIS USEFUL!!

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