Coolest Homemade Yoshi from Super Mario World Costume

I work in retail so any costume I came up with had to be family friendly. The initial plan was to be one of the Guinea Pigs from G-Force and up until about a month ago that was what I was going to be. Randomly one night while looking on line the idea to be Yoshi from the Super Mario franchise came to. I looked online EVERYWHERE to find a costume and really none under a $200 professional costume exist.

Almost giving up I found a custom Yoshi cap on eBay for $10 and settled on it. The head was not made by me. As I got to thinking I really didn’t just want to be Yoshi, I wanted to be Yoshi IN Super Mario World the game he made his first appearance in. I thought about it and ordered a few props, a Koopa, a Petey plant and a stuffed Mario. My mother brought home some shrink wrap tubes and pallet cover and a week ago I began the process of making the background. We got the fleece for Yoshi’s body and all was set.

Step one was creating the Super Mario World background. I wanted it pretty big so I joined two pallet toppers with zip ties and painted them a sky blue. I went online and found as many Mario creatures as I could and printed them out. My mother found some square shaped Styrofoam at her job and I used them to make the blocks. I painted in some of the elements from the game and let it dry. We created the egg using paper Mache and a balloon.

The next step was to figure out where to put everything without it being cluttered, how to add the sounds and the obstacle of actually wearing it. The next night I painted the blocks and added some of the characters to the board with spray adhesive. The blocks required a glue gun.

The next step was adding the pipes. I taped up the top of the tubes with green duct tape so they had a lip and then painted them with a green/blue metallic acrylic color and zip tied them to the board.

As I finished up the background of the Yoshi from Super Mario World Costume, we hit a snag with Yoshi’s body. We’d bought one pattern but decided on using another and both got really sick so Friday at 4AM realized we didn’t have enough fleece to make Yoshi’s body. Making an emergency run to WalMart we found they had one green sweatshirt and two pairs of pants. Scooping them up we went home and made a tail and mittens out of one pair of the pants and sewing a cream belly to the shirt after we realized we hadn’t bought white either.

I had picked up a small pair of ipod speakers at Ross for 3.99 and by gutting a small slit in the top of the board and using a glue gun I mounted them to the board with the wires running down the back. The last step was adding the straps so I could carry it. I thought it was a great idea but never really thought of how to make it work. My mom suggested belt material and we found a blue that matched the background perfectly and some cheap buckles. I cut the slits and inserted the belts and it ended up being like a backpack.

The last step was finding the sound effects. I have a REALLY old VHS tape from when we lived in Japan of the walkthrough of the entire game. I dubbed it to the computer and made an MP3 out of it and put it on my ipod. Added a UPS packing sticker to the back to hold the ipod in place and let it play.

Video of Yoshi from Super Mario World Costume with sounds:

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