Waluigi Costume

It's been years since I built a new costume. When my daughter was born 7 years ago, my free time diminished significantly. I could no longer find the time to start building in early August and spend late nights building. But alas, she is at the age where we can build together. To be honest, I hadn't planned on building a new costume this year because most of costume builds have been historically large and time consuming to build. Building this Waluigi costume was much simpler and quicker for me to pull off. I started the build on Oct 12th. That's a record late start for me. Please check out some of my previous costume builds.

One of my previous builds was another NIntendo character named Bowser. When I built the mask for that one, I started with a hard hat construction helmet which seemed to work great and was very comfortable. I found myself referencing my own instructable to remember some tips and techniques for this build. Because Waluigi's face is a little more geometrical, I decided that carving blue foam wasn't necessary. Instead, I drew a sketch of Waluigi's face on some styrene, cut it to size and screwed it right to the rim of the helmet with some self-tapping screws. To stiffen up the mouth area of the mask, I screwed a piece of wood in there that I cut to match the desired curve.

Once I had the basic shape of the mask defined, I transferred that shape on to a random piece of packing foam. This is very flexible. It's the kind of foam you might find in a shipping box for a computer of stereo or tv. Nice and soft, and very flexible. The stuff I used was about 1/2" thick. I used spray adhesive to attach it to the plastic face. In the next step, you'll see me making a template to build up the lower lip of the costume. At first I cut this in black foam, but then switched it to white because I didn't want the different colours showing through the craft felt that I was going to use to cover the mask.

The craft felt was purchased from the dollar store and luckily all of the colours I needed were available. The only thing I would do differently in the future is source some higher quality felt. The dollar store stuff is a little thin and see through. I also found that during the build I had to handle the mask quite a bit, and I was wearing out and creating pulls in the felt. I conveniently had some pink coloured foam for the nose, so I carved out the shape I needed and wrapped it in the pink felt. Too attached the felt I used some more spray adhesive. In order to make sure my nose wouldn't be falling off at any point, I glued a piece of dowel into the middle so that the nose could be screwed on to the mask from the inside. Before attaching the nose, I completely cover the front of the face with the beige felt.

With the nose and face installed, I quickly realized that the teeth would be quite simple to make. I stuffed some black felt into the mouth and then cut out some teeth in thin styrene. These were stuffed under the foam layer and held in place simply with friction. I never ended up gluing them in, and wore the costume on Halloween without losing any teeth. I added some small pieces of foam to add the blue eyeliner details. Does anyone really know why Waluigi's nose is pink and he has blue under his eyes??

My build started at work in my maker space, but with time running out I had to move the operation to my garage at home. This is where I started work on the eyes. First the brim for the hat was installed. I simply took a piece of black foam and covered it with purple material. This purple material came from a shirt I bought on Amazon. I bought two actually, one to wear for the costume, and one to cover the hat so that it would match my shirt. I then had to tackle how I was going to see out of this thing. This is something that I could have planned out a little better. I cut a slot right above the eyes, but just below the original brim of the hard hat. In hindsight, I could have planned to cut this hole a little bigger to give me more visibility when wearing the mask. To help conceal the fact that there is a hole for me to see out of, I ended up taking some liberty with Waluigi's eyebrows. I made them I little thicker and bushier so that they would meet up with the base of the slot I cut to look out of. You can see at this point that I've misplaced a couple of teeth and that I'm mocking up his mustache and eyeballs.

I was thinking about how I would make the eyeballs, and then the simple solution was simply using the white foam as-is. This method worked well for the mustache and the eyebrows too. Instead of wrapping foam in felt, I just used the foam. I used some punches to punch out puplils for the eyes and then just wedged them into place with friction. After making a couple new teeth, I moved onto carving the ears and covering them with more of the beige craft felt. Not sure if you can see in the pictures, but the mustache is simply held on with straight pins. The foam is very light and it held its shape perfectly.

This next part gave me some trouble. Working late in my garage I wanted to compete the shape of the hat, but I didn't really have the right materials on hand. I started with some random foam and about three rolls of duct tape. The result wasn't too bad, but it got quite heavy and was not that comfortable to wear. I also found that the material from the shirt was going to look a bit lumpy when installed over the surface. The next day I got some more of the white foam from work and shaped several layers to make up the shape of the hat. The end result was much lighter and would prove to be easier to installed and attach stuff to later.

I was hoping to find a lighter brown for the hair, but this dog bed I found at the dollar store was the perfect amount of material to make the side burns and hair at the back of the mask. Still not sure why Waluigi has a black mustache and eyebrows and brown hair. Anyway, I cut two side burn shapes in foam and used more spray adhesive to attach the doge bed material. I lucked out and found a large piece of purple felt at the thrift store. I bought it in case the purple shirt didn't work out for covering the hat. The felt was much better at hiding the imperfections in the carved foam shape that I made for the hat. It was a bit fussy wrapping the round shape with the felt, but I cut the basic shape and stuffed the edges up and under the foam shape. You can see on the back side of the mask, that I cut a groove in the foam to receive the felt. This also worked a place to stuff the hair into. I didn't even need much glue to hold it all together. I used the hot glue gun to glue on the ears and the mask was complete except for the upside down 'L' that adorns his cap. I neglected to take pictures of this step, but it's basically the same as how I make the gloves in the next step.

I had a bit of trouble tracking down some plain white gloves, and when I did, I had to buy four pairs to get two that fit right. I used some of the felt from before and cutout the 'L' shapes. I attached the layers with some double-sided tape. The last picture shows the yellow buttons I glued to the overalls that I bought. Overall this costume build went pretty smoothly and I happy that I was able to pull it off having only started on the 12th of October.

Here I am posing with my 7 year old daughter Alex who is wearing her 'Fire Flower coming out of a Question Box' costume. You can check it out in my other instructables. We had an awesome time planning and building our costumes this year! The last picture is Waluigi on the loose at the High School where I teach. I'm happy to report that while I could barely see out of my costume. I survived the day at work and the evening of trick-or-treating. We're already thinking of ideas for next year. Stay tuned.....