I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this one.  My daughter wanted a parrot piñata for her jungle-themed party (complete with a visit from Tim Cole of the Austin Reptile Service).  I figured a parrot piñata would be no problem, except maybe for making the wings.  I ended up using long skinny balloons to make the backbone of the wings, and then simply hung sheets of newspaper from the backbone and put one layer of papier-mache onto the newspaper wings to stiffen them up a little without adding too much weight. That worked pretty well, so I cut off the excess newspaper to shape the bottom of the wings, and I was ready to decorate.

And decorate.

And decorate.

I was up until 3:am the night before the party putting snipped crepe paper on those enormous wings, which ended up being a total of about 25 square feet!  (I was covering this area by gluing on strips of crepe paper that were about 1/2 inch wide by six inches long. In other words, there was 3600 square inches of wing surface, and I was covering it 3 square inches at a time -- and that was just the wings.  I'm lucky I'm not still working on it today.)  I wanted to decorate the parrot like a real species of tropical bird, but my daughter wanted purple here and green here and blue here and yellow here, and, well, it was her party, so that's what she got.