My Despicable Family Group Costume

Sitting at the the bus stop one morning in early October, I asked the kids of any ideas they wanted to be for Halloween that year and I got the usual responses. My son said “I’ll be an army man or police officer”, to which my reply was “no, you’ve already been that”. My daughter said “I’ll be Ariel” and I just rolled my eyes and said “come on guys! this is the best holiday ever. It’s my favorite time of year, work with me a little”. The bus came and off they went. I went back home and it hit me. You see, I had a brain tumor removed in May and I am bald. How can I put this into a costume? GRU! We had just watched the movie a couple of nights before and it was perfect. My son could be my minion and my daughter could be one of the little girls. Now to see if the kids would like my idea.

That afternoon when they got off the bus, I was so excited I was about to bust. I told them and they looked at each other like I was crazy. How are we gonna look like them without spending lots of money on expensive costumes? So we jumped on the web and we found this amazing site called Coolest Homemade Costumes and saw lots of great ideas. I said “I think we can do this”. So the next weekend, I implored my father to help out on my endeavor. He is an upholsterer and has lots of foam to spare. We set out to work. We scratched our heads and said, “well, lets try the garbage can idea”. No go. The can was to tight and my son was having a fit. So we just rolled the foam around him and cut. We glued it together and we had the start of the minion. Next came the dome. Now when I tell you this wasn’t easy, I mean this was a real head scratcher. I saw someone had cut foam out to look like petals and glued them together, but my father couldn’t understand until I showed him the pictures. With a little trial and error, we got it! We positioned it on top of a big yoga ball.

I had bought yellow fleece and we spray glued that onto the dome first, and then put the fleece around the foam tube and glued both together. It was looking good. We were also looking like a yellow grinch at this point, the spray glue is very sticky and the fleece is well, fleece. We popped a couple of holes into the dome on top to put black pipe cleaners for the hair. We cut out the arm holes and then the eye hole. We then used a plastic flower pot rim as the goggle. I spray painted it silver and it looked perfect. The next day we cut out blue fabric for the overalls and glued that on. I added all the other details like a felt mouth, foam teeth, a pocket and suspender buttons.

Gru was an easy outfit as he wears all black and a scarf. My grandmother whipped up a scarf just by looking at the picture I gave her, and viola, me and my bald head were done! I added the long pointy nose to make it look perfect.

My daughter had decided to go as Edith – the adopted daughter. She was basic clothes as well, and my grandmother knitted on the pink tassels on a store bought hat. We looked great!

Everyone who saw us that night was in awe. People kept asking me where we bought the costumes, and specially the minion costume. It was a little tap on the back with every comment we got. I had people take pictures of us and selfies with my son because they loved it so much. I would tell anyone who loves Halloween to make their costumes because it’s so much more rewarding in the end! Me and the kids had a great time making everything and spent more time together enjoying it rather than fighting people at the big box stores waiting to find a costume that falls apart half way through the night.

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