 My daughter was in love with porcupine pufferfish that year, so her choice of pinata didn't come as a surprise. But I had no idea how I was going to do the spikes. The spikes could only be attached with a tiny dab of glue on one end, but they had to hold their positions sticking out on every angle without sagging toward the ground. The spikes also had to be non-lethal somehow, because they would probably go flying with each hit, and I didn't want this to become an anti-personnel pinata. So nails were out. Although using crepe paper cylinders (or what I call the floral technique) solved the problem of sagging spikes, it presented another problem all its own. The pufferfish was about 11 inches in diameter, which gave it a surface area of almost 400 square inches. Each of the crepe paper cylinders has a diameter of about 1/4 of an inch. That means that covering the pinata would take over 6000 individually cut, individually made, and individually placed crepe paper pieces! Decorating this pinata took much longer than I expected. And since I couldn't set the pinata down without crunching the cylinders, I had to make a decorating stand using wire shirt hangers to rest the pinata on.
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But how could I prevent the balsa wood sticks from sagging, when they were attached on only one end?
When I made the Barbie Heart pinata a few years before, I came up with a different crepe papering technique that I used in the center of the heart to give the heart a kind of floral appearance. At the time I was only looking for a different appearance and texture, but that technique turned out to be the solution for holding the spikes in place on this pinata. I covered this entire pinata in crepe paper cylinders and then slid the glue-tipped spikes in between adjacent cylinders. The crepe paper cylinders were so tightly packed they prevented the spikes from sagging. (Go to the Barbie Heart page and scroll down to see how the little crepe paper cylinders are made.)
You can also see in these pictures that I tried to add festive "camouflage" coloring to the puffer fish by using lighter pastel colors on the underbelly, and brighter colors on the top and sides. Altogether I used 16 different colors on this pinata. The difference in color between the belly and the rest doesn't show up well in the first few pictures on this page, but it worked really well in real life -- not a single ocean predator even came close to attacking the pinata. (Too bad the same can't be said for land-based predators...)