Each "flower" in this technique is made by holding a square of crepe paper in the palm of my hand, pushing the end of an unsharpened pencil into the middle of the square, and then closing my palm around the pencil to produce a little crepe paper cylinder.  Then I squeeze the cylinder tighter around the pencil with my fingers to make it hold its shape. Normally I would already have spread glue onto the piñata, so I just apply the flower directly to the pinata without even taking it off the pencil tipI then glued the bottom of the cylinder onto the piñata.

The net result is a cylinder with a diameter of about 1/4 inch, which means you need to put about 16 of these on every square inch of the piñata in the area you're covering.  (When I made the porcupine pufferfish piñata, I covered the entire piñata in these.)  The purple and white flowers on the Barbie Heart piñata were made the same way, except that I used a rectangular piece instead of a square one for the purple and didn't roll the cylinder quite as tightly, so the flowers stick out more and there's also a bit of flaring on the ends.

The other method of cutting crepe paper is something I call the "floral technique" because the first time I did it it was intended to look like a bunch of flowers.  You can see what the result of this method looks like on the Barbie Heart piñata and on the Porcupine Pufferfish piñata.

When you're done you should have a stack of cut strips that look like this.  Peel them apart and they're ready to be glued on.

Holding the stack carefully to make sure the pieces all stay together, make a series of parallel snips that go about 2/3 of the way through the paper.  If you're having trouble keeping the stack together, break it into two piles and do them separately. I make my snips about 1/4 inch apart, but don't worry about your snips being too wide or too narrow.  Once they're fluffed up, any inconsistencies get hidden pretty quickly.

This leaves you with a stack of short strips.  (The more times you do this on one roll, the shorter the pieces will get.)

Step one:  slide the scissors through the roll about 10 or 12 layers deep and cut all the way through.  It's easy to slide the scissors through a loosely-rolled small roll of crepe paper, but the 500 foot rolls are wound too tightly for this.  You can still do it, but it's a little harder and the paper will tear in the process.

I use two different cutting techniques for decorating pinatas with crepe paper.

The first and most common technique is to cut little strips of fringe into the crepe paper.  Crepe paper streamers are 1.5 inches wide, and I cut about 2/3 of the way in, so this makes a 1 inch fringe with a 1/2 inch "backbone" of crepe paper which is the part that gets glued to the piñata.

Cutting thousands and thousands of little fringe strips can take forever, but there's a shortcut that will save you lots of time.  Slide one tooth of the scissors through the roll of crepe paper about 10 or 12 layers deep, and cut an entire stack of pieces.  Then make each snip for fringe through the entire stack, as shown below.