Pinata

I made this piñata.  It is supposed to be a spider, but I wussed out and only gave him six legs instead of eight.  This is actually my second try at making a piñata.  The first one was a dinosaur made mostly of cardboard and those streamers everyone buys for special occasions and have no idea how to use.  This guy is a Paper Mache covered balloon at his core.

What do you get when you mix together a rat’s nest and a pancake?  That’s right.  Paper Mache.  To make the glue for Paper Mache, you mix equal parts water and flour until it looks like a pancake.  I blew up a balloon and starting dousing the strips of flyers in the mixture.  The first layer was fun, but if you don’t let it dry completely apparently it will get mold in it, so I let it dry.  I did four layers.  By the end, I was picking little painful wads of flour-water off my arms and wondering if it would really work.  It smelled like play dough.

Next, I cut up about a million squares of tissue paper and wadding them up on the end of a pencil, I glued the middle to achieve the ‘puffy look.’  That was a lot more work than I expected.  I’m not going to lie.  I won’t be doing that again. 

The eyes and the legs are exactly what they look like. 

The real challenge was securing it with the rope.  I carved holes in the Paper Mache with a knife, but it broke off the chain a few times, so even though this guy looks somewhat adorable, he was also a bit of a flop because I had to reattach him to the string twice so that each kid could have one turn.  Luckily, there were a few kids there (over 10) so it wasn’t like it died after the second kid.

I think the key is building your piñatas skeleton out of cardboard, then doing a layer of Paper Mache over that (maybe two) and then … I still have to figure out that.  There are so many options for the outside.  I guess it will depend on what creature I want to make.  I’m such a sucker.  If I thought of something else round, I’d probably just go ahead and do another balloon piñata.  I just need to figure out how to make that rope more secure.  Anyone have any age-old piñata wisdom to share?