How to make a minion!

Part of the up-front material at holiday bible club includes giving the children opportunity to contribute. This takes the form of a container in which they can place jokes, questions or facts, earning points for their team.
The container is usually decorated to match the theme - so when I looked at the large water bottle I had decided to use my initial thought was some sort of space age capsule. However we had just watched Dispicable me ( since the children we tend to be several years behind on films!) so Keith suggested making a minion - the connection being the minion testing anti gravity who floats into space. I thought it might be fun but at several points in the process I seriously regretted starting down the track but the end result was great and the kids absolutely loved it.

I began by cutting a flap in the back of the bottle, this would be used to remove the slips of paper that the children had put in the neck of the bottle.

I then covered the bottle in white tissue, I used deco patch glue as I had this available but pva would have worked equally well. I covered the bottle with several layers and allowed it to dry then gave it a couple of coats of yellow acrylic paint - I initially used children' s paint but this did not cover so well.

So having now got a yellow bottle I created an eye using the lid off a round cardboard box that had a reasonable depth. This box was made to be decorated as a frame lid with a 1cm frame so this leant itself perfectly to creating the eye. I simply cut an appropriate size circle from white brown and black card and stuck them together to form the eye. The frame I would have ideally painted silver but not without incurring additional expense so it was painted grey. I would have thought a cream cheese triangles box would work reasonably well as an alternative.
The dungarees were simply cut from some scrap denim from a re-cycling store and the mouth was drawn using a sharpie.
We challenged the children to work out his name and though we are not certain even now their conclusion was Stuart. They loved him and he was soon being stuffed with space jokes and facts.

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