Press the fabric and let it set for a couple minutes as this will form your anchor. Start by spraying a vertical strip of glue on the front of the dome. I used fleece fabric to give some hiding of imperfections while having some stretch to keep wrinkles out. If it is the golfer you can avoid the dome entirely. If you have the flower lei it will hid seams. BEST ADVICE: If you're building this for someone else, try to talk them into a theme that hides as much of the dome as possible to make your life easier. The key to the minion costume is getting the smoothest dome head possible with the least visible seams. Use a good quality spray adhesive for general gluing and hot glue to tack down high stress seams. The straps around the side are strips of 1/2" EVA foam with lots of the furniture nails to look like rivits again. Be careful to not have trapped dirt and clean the acrylic with windex before install. The whole eye assembly is then hot glued into the goggle at the end. Eyelids are made with EVA foam wrapped in the applicable body fabric (fleece) and hot glued to the hoop. Take it slow to keep the paint thin and not impede the ability to see though the spandex. To get the pupils, I found a tube and did short bursts of spray paint to create each circle. When installed the wearer will be able to see out since it is dark in the costume, but those outside will see light reflect off the white hiding the person inside. Then spandex type material was stretched extremely thin over the frame and tacked in place with hot glue. The eye was made by making a hoop from plastic tubing. The lens is crystal clear acrylic plastic. The furniture nails are used to replicate the rivits. The goggles then need to be trimmed to fit the round body of the minion. Then a 4" wide strip was attached to the back. The goggles were made using EVA foam, weather stripping and round topped furniture nails. It will get you the strongest bond possible between the two sections. This glue expands and soaks into both types of foam. Then climb inside and add a healthy amount of gorilla glue around the edge. Once cured, duct tape to the top of the body tube. Make sure there is a band around the outer rim. Once the dome is off, turn it upside down and spray lines of expanding foam inside to make a "subframe" to give rigidity. It makes a HUGE difference in the final finish quality. I recommend you get light weight wall spackle and try to get the dome as smooth as possible with multiple layers of fill/sand/fill/sand. Deflating too fast can cause vacuum and it will crumple the head. Once the dome has dried on the yoga ball, deflate SLOWLY and remove. I used a 1:5 ratio of water to elmers glue. Then multiple layers of paper mache were applied. Then plastic wrap was layered on the yoga ball. The dome top was made by inflating a yoga ball to the appropriate diameter to fit the tube. I also discovered that Minions is streaming over on Netflix, so it was easy to get the kids extra-excited for their costumes by streaming that a few times.The body of each minion is a tube of 1/2" EVA foam (aka polyethylene foam) with the edge glued using contact cement. If I was feeling really detail-oriented about the whole thing, I could have finished the kids' outfits off with some black shoes and gloves. Even without those finishing touches, it was pretty obvious what they were, and people at the pumpkin patch were remarking left-and-right about their cute little DIY Minion costumes. I felt like the scarf was really all we needed to pull it off ( that plus the fact that Nate is conveniently already bald so he slipped into character fairly well, hah!). Technically he wore black pants and a grey pea coat in the movie, but it's 80 degrees here in San Diego and that just ain't happening. And for Gru, all you really need is a plain shirt and black pants or jeans.
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