How I Made a Giant Bag of Cheetos

My love for giant food is enormous so obviously I had to supersize my favorite snack food too!

What I love most about making giant food is that every one is a little different and presents different problems to solve. I’m always looking for ways to reuse simple materials to create these foods and giant Cheetos was no different! The obvious biggest hurdle was making the bag itself look realistic WITHOUT just, like, photocopying or photographing an actual Cheetos bag. Growing up, activity books were my jam. We weren’t allowed to watch television during the week, the internet didn’t exist and as a result coloring books etc. filled up a lot of my time. One of the activities I loved the most was an image transfer using a 1:1 grid. The most intricate pictures could be reproduced by copying one small pixel or square from the original to a blank grid. I used the same technique to copy and enlarge my Cheetos bag!

Copying the _Cheetos Bag

I made a photo copy of the bag and drew a 1-inch grid on top. This grid essentially breaks down a large complicated image into smaller more manageable chunks so it’s much easier for our brain to copy and keep everything to scale.

The bag is made of ram board, the heavy paper you put down to protect your floors during construction, so I rolled out my sheet of ram board and lightly drew a larger grid onto that. In other words, if my photocopied Cheetos bag was 8-inches wide and 10-inches long… the ram board grid was also 8 squares wide and 10 squares long, but each of these squares was 5-inches. You can see the grid below and then I could copy one square at a time from the photocopy onto the ram board.

With the drawing in place, all there was left to do was paint!

Making the _Cheetos

The actual Cheetos felt like a slam dunk using my favorite giant food material: spray foam. I used wax paper and just layered the foam to make each individual Cheeto. A note about scale… when making giant food, getting the right scale is pretty important. I took a minute to measure the actual dimensions of Cheetos and then figured out how that would translate to Cheetos that would realistically be in a bag as big as the one I was making. I spray painted them orange when dry and they are freaky similar to actual Cheetos.

Assembling the _{Cheetos Bag}

The inside of a Cheetos bag is silver so obviously MY Cheetos bag had to be silver on the inside too. I used spray adhesive to attach tin foil to the top of the bag (I didn’t worry about the bottom half of the bag because that won’t be visible).

The ram board is pretty rigid, but I added some crumpled paper to the inside and then glued the edges together to make the actual bag shape.

Last step was to fill the bag with the Cheetos. I glued these in place and kept a few loose to scatter around the bag. And just in case you’re wondering, this giant Cheetos bag is still in the corner of our dining room as some sort of junk food pop art and I love it.

Check out more about my _{giant food} obsession here!