So, I set to work making the printables we would need. The printable heads are meant to be printed large and then spray-glued to a square box that will go on the head. For Steve, all you need beyond that is a blue shirt and jeans! The Creeper could get a little more in depth, but we’re planning on a green tshirt and pants under a chest sized box to complete the ensemble. You can do just about anything in Minecraft! You can explore the world, bump into interesting creatures, and build some amazing creations using nothing but your imagination. It's a true sandbox! But, then again... so is life! There's really nothing stopping you from suiting up in this Steve Minecraft Costume and heading out into the biome of your neighborhood. You can meet some interesting critters, building something of your own, and maybe even run into a Creeper or two! So, I like Minecraft. You might has guessed as much after my DIY Creeper Peeps and Minecraft World Building Marshmallows. So it may not come as a surprise to you that one of our ideas for Halloween this year is to dress up like Steve (the player character) and a Creeper! I've found that one of the keys to making a great costume is to have it scaled correctly. I've seen lots of pictures of Minecraft costumes where the head is too small compared to the body, or the arms are too large compared to the body and head. These were most likely made with pre-existing cardboard boxes. To make ours truly to scale, we were going to need to make our own boxes. And to do that required a complete set of dimensions.

Before attaching your skins, tape all exposed seams on the cardboard with masking tape. This smoothes the transitions and covers the cut edges. Additionally, if you want to be a little more authentic, use a rectangular box as a chest. I’ve included a texture to print and paste onto the chest box to mimic the Creeper’s chest. That’s going all out! Steve was the hardest, as his face has 5 visible sides. I studied the in-game graphics and then created these in Illustrator in a HUGE size. That way those pixelly squares are crisp and clean and… well… not pixelly. Update: Once you settle on your image, open it in Photoshop. Next open up a blank Photoshop file and set the canvas size to exactly match the dimensions of your surface of interest on the costume. For instance, each side of our head measured 16.25 x 16.25 so we set the canvas size to that for all surfaces on the head.

The box was 16x16x16 and since there were eight squares across and down pictured I knew my squares would have to be 2×2. With my paper cutter ready to go I spent the next hour or so cutting up a bunch of squares. For years we have been trying to convince our kids that Halloween is all about making your costumes, not buying them. Sadly, this has fallen on deaf ears year after year after year. Our vision of what would be awesome and their vision of what would be awesome has never aligned... until now! Thank you Minecraft! Hand grips: Since the costume arm is much larger than the wearer's arm, we needed to add a feature that could be grabbed with your hand to keep the arm from falling off. We cut a U shape piece of styrofoam and glued it near the circular hole with liquid nails. This worked really well, and allows for maximum flexibility when defending yourself against creepers or mining for cobblestone. Grab a square box that fits you or your child’s head. Print the base file, and apply it to all but the front side of the box. Print the face file and apply it to the front of the box. Cut out eye holes (choose one of the squares if you want it to be covert) and Voila! A creeper head costume! Wear all green and you are good to go. Perfect for the game-minded person in your life! If you have Adobe Illustrator ( free trial here), you can open the file up in it and select your size paper (making sure it corresponds to the paper size selected with your printer), then choose the "tile" option and select "imageable areas". For the head, this will print it out in 7 sheets if you're using legal sized paper. If you're using letter size, you'll need twice that.

Velcro the head: The head, which ends up being pretty large relative to the body, needs to be secured in place to prevent it from inadvertently flopping off. We used some strips of 2" Velcro and Gorilla glued them to the body and underside of the head. Okay, okay. So maybe we've never seen Creeper in real life, but his Minecraft costume really is the greatest way to bring the sandbox game to life! Fun Details

Before I get into this I feel compelled to apologize. When I made this for my son I had no idea I would end up putting on my blog so I didn’t take any pictures for a tutorial. I didn’t even take great photos of the head itself. Trust me when I say this is really easy to put together…even without step by step pictures. Arch-nemesis: Does your Minecraft Steve need a motral enemy? Build a Creeper Costume --> https://www.instructables.com/id/Telescoping-Minecraft-Creeper-Costume/

The first step is to make your skins. As previously mentioned, we used a high resolution papercraft template as the sorce image for our Minecraft Steve. It took some time to find one that had a high enough resolution to not lose its definition when blown up to 18x its size. reddish brown (I see that I used red so I must not have been able to find reddish brown at Michaels) The problem with Minecraft Steve is that there really aren't any action figures to measure (at least not in my house). There are, however, hundreds of papercraft templates out there on the web. Step one is to search for a high resolution template. This will give you every dimension you will need for every component to the body. It will also serve to provide the 'skins' for your boxes... but more about that later. Once you've gathered the dimensions, you will need to then determine your scale factor. Since this costume is for my son, we took our key scaling dimension off of him. Our scaling dimension was measured from his shoulders to the ground. The thought is that the body portion of the costume is supported by his shoulders, and as a result the shoulders of Minecraft Steve need to match this height. Shoulder pads: Foam was also added under the top surface of the body to prevent the cardboard from digging into my son's shoulders. This significantly improved the comfort of the costume.