I cannot draw, heck, I can't even draw a straight line with a ruler.
With Halloween coming, B decided he wanted to be a Ninja Turtle. Easy, there are costumes to buy.
O decided that he wanted to be Minecraft Steve. If you are not familiar with this game, Steve is the main character. This game is all the rage with kids now, but I really know nothing about it except that you build things and you get rid of "creepers", which are zombies. The game is old school graphics and pixellated.
Well, great idea O, but there are no costumes anywhere. I did find a head on Amazon, but it was a painted cardboard box, at the grand cost of $30cdn plus shipping. There was no way I was going to spend that on a piece of cardboard! After looking it up online and studying the pictures, and reading a couple of other blogs, I thought that I would be able to make him the costume. I kind of combined a couple of ideas from a couple other blogs to get to my final result.
Step 1 was to make the head.
Materials needed:
cardboard box
different colours of fleshy toned paper cut in to squares, plus a black or dark brown for the head
hot glue gun
paper cutter (for cutting a LOT of squares)
ruler or measuring tape
My inspiration for this part came from this blog . I got a box proprtionate to the size of O's head, bought A pack of cardstock paper from Michaels, plus an extra pack to get the right colours. The head seemed to be layed out in an 8x8 pattern, so I found the centre of the box and split the box in to a four part grid. I then figured out the size I would need to cut the squares in order to fit eight across. This will depend on the size of your box, but for me it meant a 1.5"x1.5" square.
After that I laid out the pattern, picked up the hot glue gun and proceeded to glue the squares on to the box, leaving an empty space where I needed to cut out the eye holes.
Step 2 was to make the sword
Materials needed:
Foam poster board
Black, yellow and brown paint.
I was lucky enough to find a template for all the weapons used here.
I printed off the template for the sword (found at the bottom of the blog post in the link) cut it out and painted it. He wanted the gold sword, hence the yellow paint. I painted the outline first, then the middle, and finally the handle.
Step 3 was to paint the body.
Materials needed:
Larger cardboard box
spray paint (teal)
exacto knife to cut out head and arm holes
You don't need to do this step. Minecraft Steve wears a teal shirt and jeans, so your little Minecraft guy could go out like that. However we live in Canada, and need to bundle up for trick or treating, so I needed something that he could wear his jacket under.
Using O as measurement I cut the flaps off the bottom of the box, and cut out the holes needed. I then spray painted two coats on the box to get Steve's body.
The end result turned out really well. O was ecstatic with his costume, he was the only Minecraft character in the neighbourhood, and everyone (kids) knew who he was. A crafting success for this mom!
