Ole!  






  Medusa Piñata  
   

I know she's ugly.  She's supposed to be ugly.  Just don't tell her that.

I thought it would be fun to give the kids a mirror and make them battle this piñata while looking at her reflection, but my wife made many irrational arguments about broken mirrors and kids getting hit by wildly swinging sticks, and so like Zeus I simply rolled my eyes and sighed, "Yes, Hera." And then my wife demanded to know who this "Hera" woman was and how long I had been seeing her, and went on about how if she ever caught up with her she would turn her into a toad or a weed or some such thing.  Finally I decided I better start another war among mortals to distract her and shut her up already.  And to amuse myself, of course.
   
This is one of those piñatas that doesn't really turn out according to plan.  The biggest problem in the design of this one was, how do you get all those curling snakes to stay in place when they're only attached at one end?  I thought I would try papier-mache first and see if it held.  If that worked, then my plan was to paint this piñata instead of crepe papering it so that the snakes would have a smooth look to them.  Unfortunately, it took so much papier-mache to anchor them in that each snake arose from a bump in Medusa's head.  The snakes also weren't as smooth as I had hoped, so painting them would have revealed their true papier-mache nature, so they still wouldn't have looked as snake-like as I intended. Also, even though she had 28 snakes for hair, if I had painted them there still would have been a lot of bare scalp, so she would have looked like a hair-loss Medusa.  Check out the photo below and you'll see what I mean.

Here's what she looked like along the way.  Using crepe paper snakes, Medusa had a full head of hair, but had hairy-looking snakes instead of smooth snakes.  I tried to compromise by not fluffing up the crepe paper, so the snakes would be smoother.  If I had it all to do over again, I wouldn't have even cut the crepe paper, and would instead have simply wrapped crepe paper around the snakes, similar to what I did on the mouse tail on the Warlord of Nibblecheese piñata.  I think this piñata turned out pretty well all things considered, but if there is another Medusa piñata in my future, it will look better than this one.

I used four different colors of green crepe paper in the hair.  The eyes were painted styrofoam balls with veins drawn on using red Sharpie.  The eyebrows were pipe cleaners.  The teeth were card stock, and the tongue was newspaper covered in papier-mache to make it hold its shape.

   
One thing about this piñata is that the snakes effectively shielded the head from attack, so the snakes had to be knocked away with the stick before the head could be torn open.  This was good fun for the kids, because each snake could be removed by a single well-placed hit.  The arms and legs of the Warlord of Nibblecheese piñata were made the same way -- they were long and thin, and could be snapped off before the body was broken open.  Kids love knocking pieces off the piñata before the main break, so I try to make appendages like this easily removable. In this case, removing the snakes became a kind of pre-game show, and they didn't even make an effort to break her open until they had completely deserpented her head.