| Rainbow Zebra Piñata | |||||||||||
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My younger daughter was bitten by a zebra when she was eight years old, and has loved zebras ever since. Don't ask me to explain it, I'm not a little girl. All I know is that she would probably not have responded the same way if she had been bitten by a rattlesnake. Naturally she wanted a zebra piñata for her birthday, but a plain old black and white zebra piñata just wasn't festive enough for a party. Enter the Rainbow Zebra. The zebra took about six weeks from start to finish. It was over four feet tall and took 15 lbs of flour, 16 rolls of crepe paper, and five bottles of Elmer's glue. It took more than 20 hours just to cut and glue the crepe paper. The newspapers that went into it included hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the deaths of two shining stars from my childhood: Bob Denver (Gilligan) and Don Adams (Maxwell Smart and Inspector Gadget). The Rainbow Zebra piñata had three separate candy compartments in the body (hoisting this thing was not easy!) and lasted 15 minutes. After finishing this one, I figured I could probably make a second Rainbow Zebra piñata in about two weeks. A couple years later I found out how wrong I was... |
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| The mane was made from cardboard covered in crepe paper. The crepe paper was attached to the mane using double-stick tape, because glue would have shown through. I love the kind of Trojan helmet look of a real zebra's mane, so I exaggerated it here. The vertical lines within each color were done by folding the crepe paper before taping it on; this also gave the mane some additional three-dimensional "ruffle" effect instead of just having the flat sides of the cardboard. | |||||||||||
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The tail tassel was made from black yarn. I couldn't attach one big yarn tassel to the rest of the tail and still have it hang properly, so I made ten or eleven smaller yarn tassels and bunched them all together. Each tassel was individually attached to the papier mache tail, and that way I was able to give the tassel the shape I wanted. In hindsight (pun!) I think I used too many tassels, and the tail is a bit too robust. Maybe eight or nine tassels would have been better. It's fine, Brian. It's fine. | ||||||||||
| I finished this piñata around 6:30 pm the day before the party. By 2:30 the following afternoon it had already been destroyed. | |||||||||||
| Click here for a quick picture tour of the making of this Rainbow Zebra piñata. | |||||||||||
| A few years later I made a second Rainbow Zebra piñata for Maker Faire 2007, but this time I exaggerated some of the features even more (like the ears, hooves, and that Trojan helmet mane I mentioned earlier, now in XXL). The first zebra looks more lifelike, but the second one has more attitude. This photo is a lot brighter than the earlier ones because 1) I used more brightly colored crepe paper, 2) the first zebra is standing mostly in shadow and this one is in sun, and 3) by this time I had gotten a digital camera. The earlier Rainbow Zebra photos are scans of film prints. | |||||||||||
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| Rainbow Zebra 2. I'm just glad she wasn't bitten by a giraffe. | |||||||||||