My daughter was in love with porcupine pufferfish that year, so her choice of piñata 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 like shrapnel with each hit, and I didn't want this to turn into an anti-personnel piñata.  So nails were out.

But how could I prevent the balsa wood sticks from sagging if they are attached on only one end?

When I made the Barbie Heart piñata 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 piñata.

I covered this entire piñata 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.  (To see how the little crepe paper cylinders are made, check out the Tips and Tricks page.)

Although using crepe paper cylinders 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.  It takes about 16 crepe paper cylinders side by side to cover one square inch.  That means that covering the entire piñata would take over 6000 individually cut, individually made, and individually placed crepe paper pieces!

Decorating this piñata took much longer than I expected. And since I couldn't set the piñata down without crunching the cylinders, I had to make a decorating stand using wire shirt hangers to rest the piñata on.

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 piñata. 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 piñata.  (Too bad the same can't be said for land-based predators...)

Speaking of which...

My wife insisted on the safety glasses.  The piñata broke really well.  The lightweight balsa wood sticks went flying with each hit, but lost their momentum to air resistance very quickly and didn't fly far.

The floral technique was very effective at cushioning the piñata from stick attacks, but I expected this, and slashed the underlying papier mâché with a razor blade to weaken it before decorating it.  You can see details of this on the Make a Pufferfish page.

A few years later I made a second porcupine pufferfish piñata.  The design was almost identical (minus the eyelashes), but this one had 228 spikes.

For more photos, visit the Son of Pufferfish page.