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| Okay, so the piñata ain't half as scary as the poster, but it's twice as festive, and that's what matters! |
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I had a lot of fun building this one even if the details did get a little out of control. This piñata had two candy compartments, one in the braincase and one in the lower jaw. The two compartments were separated inside the skull by what you could imagine as a papier mâché "volcano." It was a cone pointing upward with a hole in the top. Most of the candy was put into the upper compartment where it rested around the base of the volcano, but when the piñata was hit, some candy would fly up and fall into the hole and end up in the lower jaw. At the same time, some of the candy already in the lower jaw would fall out the mouth. The idea was that the piñata would continually release little bits of candy with each whack until at last the skull was fatally fractured and the remaining candy spilled out. And believe it or not, it actually worked as planned. The skull is just over 2 feet tall. The torches are each 4 1/2 feet long, and the Jack Sparrow voodoo doll is 11 inches tall. The color of the skull doesn't show that well in this picture, but it was mostly white with splotches of cream colored "rot." |
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| This piñata was much more of a craft project than most. My wife made the Jack Sparrow voodoo doll (including the little vest) and I drew the face. My wife also made the blue piratess outfit shown above, and gave birth to the beautiful pirate maiden herself. Accessorizing the piñata and doll with beads and feathers took far more time than it should have. Ordinarily I like to keep my piñata expenses dirt cheap, but with this one I had to go buy craft supplies. | |||||||||||||||||||
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 of stick I found in our backyard and painted red and black and gold. You can see the cream-colored skull rot better in this close-up than you can in the earlier photo. |
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| The headband medallion was a flat wooden disk. I drew a raised design on it using fabric paint and then painted it gold. | |||||||||||||||||||
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The headband cloth was shredded in the back to look more piratey. Arrr. Pirates wore ripped clothes a lot because their moms weren't around to make them go change into something nice. The torches were papier-mâchéd together, then decorated with crepe paper, and then "tied together" using raffia. Then I attached to the back of the skull using wires, and glued on some more raffia to hide the wires. |
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