Smith Family Weblog

We are having a birthday party for Ava this weekend, and we’ve been working on a few projects to prepare. A few weeks ago, we started building a papier mâché piñata.

I inflated a round 36-inch balloon to about 24 inches, and Ava and I covered it in strips of newspaper dipped in wallpaper paste. The online instructions we used suggested four layers, but we stopped at two. Fortunately, that seemed to be enough.

After the paste was dry, we began work on the tissue-paper roses needed to cover the beast. I was grateful to have two willing partners in this endeavor:

To make the roses, we wound them around our fingers and secured the bottom with a staple.

Olivia’s approach was a bit less complicated.

I secured the roses to the base using hot glue, and only burned myself 750 times. I snapped this photo with my phone at the half-way point; I’d used 150 roses. This was the the moment I realized this pinata would be destroyed and thrown away. ON PURPOSE.

Nevertheless, we carried on, making numerous tissue paper runs over the course of the past week. In all, we made about 325 roses. Here’s the end result, filled with packages of Hershey’s kisses, and awaiting a visit from a few woodland fairies.

This is definitely a project I will do again–we had a good time working on it together. But next time, I’ll use a much smaller balloon!