Easy Kid Craft: Birthday Party Pinata

How fun is a piñata? Kids love the challenge of striking down a piñata filled with candies, trinkets, and toys. Moms love ease of a built-in birthday party activity and treats for all participants. Another thing moms love about the piñata is the ease of making one. The birthday child can actually help create his or her own piñata several days before the party and craft it to follow the birthday theme. Learn how to make this easy, kid-friendly craft.

Piñata Craft Materials

Decide upon a theme and collect your materials. In addition to wrapped candy and other piñata surprises, you'll need: newsprint, toilet paper tubes or paper cups, string, masking tape, poster paint, craft glue, water, salt, flour, balloons, paint brush, crepe paper, and a large mixing bowl. This is where creativity rules. Anything you can safely fasten to a piñata, that can also take a beating, is allowable as decoration.

For the sake of explanation, let's assume the child is making a fat pink pig. Two balloons will be needed, one for the head and one for the body. Four toilet paper rolls or paper cups will form the legs, a spring coil will form the tail, cut cardboard taped on with masking tape will form the ears, and a small paper cup will form the snout. The rest is up to the paper mache strips and poster paint.

Piñata Craft Preparation

Lay sheets of wax paper on the work surface, for ease of clean-up. Blow up the balloons for the correct body and head size, and attach them gently with masking tape. In a shallow pan, place the balloons. This holds them so they don't roll around. Now it's time to fasten-on the paper mache strips of torn one inch wide lengths of newsprint. These can be prepared before time. Torn strips make a smoother blend into each other on the piñata, than cut ones.

Piñata Paste Mixture

To make the starch mixture, you can use a simple 1-1 cup flour and water mixture or 1-2 cup mixture with 2 T. salt added to prevent mold. Play with it and start with it thicker. You can always add more water. Some folks use cooking spray on the balloons to help them release more easily when popped. And some folks purchase ready-made liquid starch in place of making a flour-paste recipe.

Piñata Construction

Now comes the messy part and the fun part for kids. Soak only about 5-6 strips at a time and slightly overlap them across the balloons, leaving a small hole on top of the body section. To prepare each strip, slide the strip between thumb and index finger to pull off excess paste. After the balloons are covered as much as possible with the first layer of strips, allow the piñata to dry for 24 hours. Add the next layer, going the opposite direction. The more layers added, the stronger the piñata. Refrigerate any left over flour-paste for use on the next layer. Add more water if the paste gets too dry.

Piñata Contents

When the piñata is fully dry and there are enough layers, pop the balloons with a pin. You don't need to remove the balloons. Fill the piñata with wrapped candy, toys, and other fun sunrises. Prepare to close the opening with masking tape and paper mache it closed. However, before closing the hole, attach sturdy fishing line or string around the opening for hanging the piñata. That way the masking tape covers the tied ends, and then paper mache seals it all together for added strength.

When the hole is dry, it's time to tip the pig over and fasten on his legs, tail, ears, tail, and snout. These additions are more decorative than structural, and they only require a single layer of paper mache to hold them in place.

Piñata Decorations

After the piñata dries, it's time to decorate it. If the child is small, help with the painting of eyes, ears, and nostrils. In addition to paint, you can make a fluffy-looking pig by fastening 3-inch squares of crepe paper to the pig with a glue dot in the middle of the square. The edges fringe out and away from the pig. To make it easier to paint or glue squares onto the surface of the pig, the piñata can be hung, allowing it to spin around for decorating.

All that's left is to hang the birthday party piñata in an appropriate place and wait for the party. This year, why not decide to stretch your child's birthday over several days, and include a pre-party craft? Be sure to take pictures though, because the piñata is history in a matter of minutes.