Birthday Week - Completing the Crazy Dragon Pinata Making Scheme

First off let me apologize to my readers about the delay in follow up posts. April is a very VERY busy month for me between birthdays, (for friends and family I observe 16 birthdays, one almost every other day in April, Maxwell's and my own included) gardening (my other business and passion), spring cleaning, two growing little boys, and being sick I'm lucky I found time to shower let a lone spend a few hours composing a blog. Now on with the show....

When I was a kid we would put together these huge New Year's Eve parties and the main attraction for the kids was the pinata; so I have been making pinatas for years but always with wheat paste and newspaper strips. Now that I have tried instant paper mache I have some mixed feelings about both.  Wheat paste and paper is a lot more work and I don't have to prep my frame to make the strips stick. Instant paper mache is faster but the frame prep kills me. Blarg.

So after my dragon's body dried I made up the head - basically following the same method - and stuck them together with some heavy duty masking tape. If you can't find a wide masking tape at your local big box try a home improvement store paint section, they carry a wide variety of tape and if it's not in the paint section I can guarantee they have it some where.  This worked fairly well. I then covered the tape with instant mache and molded it to look seamless. All in all I think I did a good job.

My fabulous sister Felicia Reynolds is an amazing artist who came to help me out with putting the color on our dragon. She began by taking brown packing paper (what I had on hand, but newspaper could just as easily be used) and twisting it into a tail which was then covered with the wide masking tape/painters tape and taped to the body; she also made arms and legs the same way by molding the brown paper and then wrapping it with the tape and taping them to the body (the masking tape works best for this as painters tape will peel off too easily). Then we used the pattern from DIY Fluffies to cut the wings, ears, and tail spikes from green poster board. Lastly we capped our little fellow with a couple of horns.

If you do make a dragon pinata at home and you have small children be sure to give yourself at least two weeks of lead time because paper mache takes a long time to dry and preparing and gluing the crepe paper streamers can be a nightmare with helpful little hands around.

Starting at the bottom and working our way up we began by cutting several yellow wrapping tissue paper ovals and glued them on in two or three layers. Because wrapping tissue and crepe paper are very fragile and turn soggy when wetted with traditional white glue we used glue sticks. The results were wonderful as you can see, no puckering or bleeding. Once we got the bottom covered with the yellow tissue we covered the feet with green wrapping tissue as well and added a few little black construction paper claws.

Next up Felicia marked out the tummy area and put down the initial layer of red tissue. We also covered the arms first in lime tissue then a piece of dark green tissue in the shape of an arm was added to really give it some great definition. covering the arms and tummy first was very important because it gave us a clear area to work around. Then we layered on the yards, and yards, and yards of lime green crepe paper streamers (I highly recommend starting at tip of the tail and working up to the head).

To prepare the crepe paper streamers I would loose a few feet from the roll and cut 2/3 of  the width every 1/2 inch or so while Felicia glued the other end to the body frame. With two adults working on the project together - one cutting crepe paper and the other doing the gluing - it took us about four hours to put the whole dragon together. If I had done it on my own, not only would it not have looked so awesome but it most likely would have taken me several days.

What do you think, how did it turn out?

Up next; three year olds with swords! :)