Holy Piñata!

Nathan's birthday is coming up and he wanted a piñata. Trying to find one that fits into the reptile theme is a little hard.  I had found a tutorial for a spider pinata from Oh Happy Day and was thinking about doing that, but it didn't quite fit my reptile theme for Nathan's birthday party.  I was then scrolling through the awesome pinatas featured on Oh Happy Day and came across this Alligator Pinata.  This was PERFECT!  I read the instructions and it didn't seem that hard to do.  It also helped that we just made a trip to Ikea and bought some shelves, so I had the perfect cardboard box to make the pinata.

Assembling the cardboard part was really easy and took no time at all.  The next part, the fringe, was where I experienced the challenge!  First, I didn't get the kind of crepe paper she recommends.  I just used green tissue paper that I found on sale.  It would have to work for me.  Cutting fringe takes A. LONG. TIME!  Luckily, I had my super birthday helper that wanted to cut the fringe.

This pinata took a lot longer to make than I thought it was going to take.  The fringe alone was a half day project.  And by half day I was really working on it the whole time with little breaks.  I think that it was all worth it because the finished product looked awesome!  

It looked even more awesome in person

Watch out for those teeth!

Since I've never made a pinata before I didn't know how this one would hold up.  I figured that it would do okay since it was cardboard, but I didn't know how the seams would hold up since I just used masking tape.  I thought about using duct tape, but then I thought that it might never break.  We loaded up the pinata with lots of toys.

Now came the time for it to be destroyed :(.  It was a little sad to know that kids would pound on this and break it after all of the hard work that Nathan and I put into it.  

Luckily, it made it through all the kids but one.  Where it ended up breaking was at the top and that was because I didn't think about a great rigging system for how to hang it, so the top wasn't the strongest.  Just a small chunk fell off.  The pinata hardly got any damage at all on the sides of it.  The cardboard did a great job.  Oh, and we also used this lightweight plastic bat.  One the kids wanted to keep the pinata and I was going to let him, but Christopher said that we should keep it and use it again.  Excellent idea!  

Mr. Alligator pinata will be making another appearance in a year or so at a future birthday party for Anderson.  Hopefully, he will still be holding up well.  I'm sure that I'll also reinforce some areas with duct tape :]!

More birthday pictures soon!

-Heather