Pinata Boy - Green Shoyru

Green Shoyru Piñata

This monster piñata was four and a half feet tall and had a seven foot wingspan!

What's a shoyru?

This is a shoyru.

It's one of the adoptable pets on the free online game site

Constructing this beast was as much an engineering problem as it was an art project. The body had to be sturdy enough to support the weight of the head and the wings, but still had to be demolishable by a bunch of 11-year-old girls with a stick. The design is top-heavy, so placing the hanging point was important to prevent the thing from flipping over once it was lifted off the ground. But the real problem was going to be those wings. They're huge, and they're attached only at two teeny little points on the back. Somehow I had to find a way for the wings to be able to keep their shape and not fall off or collapse under their own weight.

The head and body of the shoyru are punch balls, covered with more layers of papier-mache than I can count. The walls of these sections were at least a quarter inch thick. The kids would never be able to break through that, so I weakened the walls by stabbing them repeatedly with a knife. These perforations left the piñata structurally sound enough to support its weight, but created little weak spot vulnerabilities throughout the pinata that the kids could prey upon. Eventually these would tear open, the holes would widen, and then the whole thing would come apart, and that's pretty much how it worked out.

I solved the wing problem by buying some heavy gauge copper wire from Home Depot. I don't remember the thickness, but I'm pretty sure it was more than 1/4 inch in diameter. The copper was threaded through two small holes in the back of the shoyru and duct-taped firmly in place I covered the copper with foam pipe insulation that I had painted green, and hung another piece of pipe insulation straight down to form the "fingers" on the wings. The wing membranes were made of poster board that was covered with green wrapping paper.

This piñata holds a special place in my heart because when one of the mothers dropped her girls off for the party, she saw the piñata and went back to her car to get her husband so he could see it. He was very impressed, and both he and his wife said many wonderful things about the piñata. What makes this special for me is that those parents were the Mexican consul and his wife. (Insert happy dance here.)

The green shoyru piñata after it was attacked by a vicious pack of candivores.