Homemade Pinata

My kids wanted to throw a surprise party for their favorite babysitter. They wanted to have a pinata. Those are easy to find around here, but not so cheap. I knew we could easily make one. I looked online for instructions. This is a very novice try at making one. There is definitely room for improvement. I'm sure my kids will want one for every future birthday.

I found these links on About.com after I made ours. There are so many good ideas out there.
Of course Family Fun Magazine has a good one. Here's a video that shows how to make one.


Basically you start with:

A balloon
strips of newspaper
flour
water
a bowl that will fit the balloon

(optional: glue, rubber gloves, decoration for the outside)

Blow up the balloon and tie it. Mix one cup flour and two cups water together (add a few tablespoons of Elmer's glue, if you want). Lay down some newspaper to catch spills. Have the balloon on top of the bowl to make it easier to lay the glued newspaper strips on it. Dip the strips in the flour/water mixture and gently squeeze off excess. Put strips all over the balloon in one full layer, leaving a hole at the top (where the tie is) as big as a fist.


Allow that layer to dry and add another layer. Repeat until you have at least three layers. The more kids (or older) you will have at the party, the more layers you may want to have. It took our pinata about 7 hours to dry completely after each layer (we live in dry AZ, though - everything dries faster).

My kids decorated the pinata with dad (while I went grocery shopping). You could decorate it any way you like. I saw one video online that just had the final layer of paper as colorful construction paper in a mosaic design. Very pretty.

When you are ready to fill the pinata you could put some extra newspaper inside with the candy. We didn't completely fill the hole. We just put the candy and paper inside until it was full, then stuffed some tissue paper at the very top. This way the candy wasn't flying out the top. I'm sure you can come up with ideas to cover the hole better. I was lazy.





When it came time to whack at the pinata we used a hole punch to put two holes in the sides and didn't have twine (we were at a friends' house and we forgot our twine) to use, so we used a bungee with hooks. It worked, but ended up ripping through the pinata. We made some bigger holes down lower. That worked better, but looked silly. Oh well. The kids loved it.