Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Enderdragon Pinata

The Big Kid's birthday was last week.

If you've been around a while, I'm sure you've figured out that the kid's obsessed with Minecraft.


As chronicled here (DIY Foam Minecraft Weapons)



And here (DIY Enderdragon Costume)


And finally, here (DIY articulating wings for the Enderdragon costume).

Well, now we get to add to this obsession..


It's safe to say there's an Enderdragon trend.

The Big Kid asked me on Friday night if we could make a piñata for a small get-together we were planning for Monday. Having never made a piñata based on... well... anything, I wasn't sure how this was going to go, but we had a busy weekend planned, so it had to go smoothly.

We gathered all the cardboard we could find, and constructed this.


Basically, we winged it. I disassembled most of these boxes and cut/taped them back together to create proportionate body parts. Important, I cut 3 sides of a rectangle in the body so I would have a place to put candy.

Saturday morning consisted of us quickly giving the dragon a base coat of black spray paint and cutting the tissue paper into strips to apply when we got home.


I began applying the strips at the bottom of the body, and worked my way around. The next strip slightly overlapped the row below it, like roofing shingles!


This was the longest part of the whole project.

Project tip: Don't use a fan when applying these strips to the piñata body. Just... trust me.

After it was all covered, the Big Kid and I made 15 rectangular cubes from a cereal box (they measured 1/2" x 3 1/2" x 1 1/2") for the "spikes" and nostrils, and I cut out some eyes from white and purple construction paper.


Before attaching everything that we'd made, it seemed like this was a good time to attempt wings.




Now, I cut strips of cardboard for the lines in the wings and painted them grey. Then for the black, I layered three sheets of tissue paper (with spray adhesive) and cut it to fit between the lines and used spray adhesive to attach.

Do I have a picture of this?

Somewhere. I just can't find any right now.

Then to attach, I put a piece of cardboard across the back of the enderdragon (painted black to later cover with tissue paper so it all blended in).


Then attached the wings to that! At first I tried to just use hot glue, but that didn't hold. Eventually I found some small bolts/nuts and put one on each wing into the "support". While I was at it, I bolted the support to the body... Needless to say, the wings didn't come off while it was being hit.

Then we attached the spikes, nostrils and eyes (hot glue), and he was almost finished! We ended up doing legs super last minute, but we just cut out cardboard, painted it black, and hot glued them on.


Going into this, I had no idea what the final scale was doing to be. He measured in at 4' 9" long. 

It really looked like a dragon!


The Big Kid had a brilliant idea to use the Minecraft Steve head as a sort of "blindfold", so we just turned it to it's side while they hit  it with Mr. Goats' shinai (for the record, a shinai plus cardboard piñata is a bad combination. The cardboard's too tough and the shinai is made to have "give" so that it doesn't hurt you... It just... didn't work!). 


If I were to do this over, I would've scaled it down significantly, but also figured out a way to paper mache or use less sturdy cardboard.  We ended up beating the thing to death.

But in the end, she and her friends LOVED it, and I got one "Cool Mom" point.

Have you made any piñatas recently?

1 comment:

  1. Ha ha yes, I made one for my boys 10th birthday in September. It was a box with candy thrown in and string attached. I held it together with duct tape, no time to decorate it...but they loved it anyway, no where near as awesome as this! You are amazing miss Gina this is the coolest piñata ever! So fun and creative, I love the "Blindfold" too! You deserve the "Cool mom" point for sure!

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