| Rainbow Zebra Piñata | |||||||||
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This is my favorite piñata so far. My younger daughter loves zebras, but a black and white piñata wasn't festive enough for a party, so we made a rainbow zebra instead. 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 Bob Denver and Don Adams. The piñata had three separate candy compartments in the body, and lasted 15 minutes. |
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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 Trojan helmet look of a 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. I used the same folding technique on the black lines of the mane. | |||||||||
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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 I think I used too many of them, and the tail tassel is perhaps a bit too robust. Maybe eight or nine tassels would have been better. | ||||||||
| Click here for a quick picture tour of the making of the Rainbow Zebra piñata. | |||||||||