Pinata Boy - Pirates of the Caribbean

Party well, matey, for on Saturday you die.

Okay, so the piñata ain't half as scary as
the poster, but it's twice as festive, and
that's what matters!

The Pirates of the Caribbean piñata was just over two feet tall. It had two candy compartments, one in the braincase and one in the lower jaw. The mouth of the piñata was open slightly, so candy would spill out of the lower compartment with each good whack, and there was a small hole connecting the two compartments so that candy from the upper compartment could trickle down into the lower compartment to replace candy that was lost through the mouth. The torches are each about 4 1/2 feet long, and the Jack Sparrow voodoo doll is about 11 inches tall. The color of the skull doesn't show that well in the pictures, but it was mostly white with splotches of cream colored "rot." The pinata stick was styled as a black-handled pirate sword.

This piñata turned out to be a lot more of a "craft project" than most. My wife did most of the work on the Jack Sparrow voodoo doll. Accessorizing the piñata and doll with beads and feathers took far more time than it should have. During this phase of the project my recessive X-chromosome became dominant -- she's a perfectionist and can be pretty hard to deal with sometimes!

The top gold piece is cardboard decorated with fabric paint and then painted gold. The gold "bell" near the bottom was cut from an egg carton and painted gold. The Y-shaped bone/stick/whatever is a piece from a stick in our backyard painted red and black and gold.

You can see the skull rot better in this close-up than you can in the earlier photo.

The headband medallion was a flat wooden disk that I drew a design on using fabric paint and then painted over with gold spray paint.

The headband cloth was shredded in the back to look piratey. The torches were first papier-mached together, then decorated with crepe paper, and then "tied together" using raffia. They were then attached to the back of the skull using wires, and then more raffia was glued on to hide the wires.