Minions Goggles Project

My friends and I went to a New York Comic Con party dressed as Gru and his Minions! It's a quick and silly costume and I was tasked with making the goggles so here's how I did it.

I made a template out of paper to fit my face and transferred it to 5mm craft foam. Here are the dimensions. If you get a regular piece of 9x12 foam, you can make 3 pairs of goggles from it because each eyepiece is 8x2. I don't know how long the angled side is but if you measure everything else, that won't matter. You obviously need to cut 2 of these out for both your eyes.

The Minions goggles have bolts so I used this nifty little circle cutter I got on Amazon for about $9 to do that. This is 2mm craft foam, and you'll need 6 bolts per goggle. You also need to cut a 1/2 inch by about 9 inch strip of 2mm craft foam for the border of the goggles.

Apologies for skipping a lot of steps here but I was under a time crunch to get these ready. Use a heat gun to form the 5mm foam pieces around a PVC pipe or anything round to achieve a circular shape. Then glue the ends together using superglue or Barge contact cement. Then glue the 1/2 inch 2mm strip of foam you cut out around the front edge of the eyepiece. You can then glue the two eye pieces together (make sure it's the narrow side) to make the goggles. If they don't fit you, you can adjust the size of the template up or down. Then you can glue on the bolts you made, 2 on the top, 2 on the bottom, and 2 on the sides. And here's what it should look like.

I assembly lined this because I had to make 4 pairs total. I also tried hand painting one pair to see how that would work.

I ended up spray painting everything with 2 coats of silver spray paint which ended up coating a lot better. I hot glued 1 inch nylon webbing to the inside of the goggles and stuck velcro on the ends to make the straps adjustable. If I were to redo this, I'd probably use elastic nylon webbing, but this is what I had at the time. But these are finished!

And here's our happy little group! Just add on a yellow shirt (gotta love that random Colombian Minion), blue jeans, and suspenders and have fun!

It also really helps to have a friend who looks like Gru... ;)

And you know after making this, I think I could make a really nice pair of Ecto goggles (from Ghostbusters) out of foam... ;)