Comprehensive Guide to Making a Homemade Pinata
A step by step guide to making a homemade piñata.
In celebration of Latino Heritage Month, our family has been participating in various activities geared toward learning about and recognizing the contributions of the Latino community in the United States. We took on a piñata project and honestly had no idea how involved and time consuming it would be. It took us one and a half weeks to finish two piñatas. We started the project by educating the kids about the history of piñatas.
We informed them that the piñata likely originated over 700 years ago in Asia. Explorers discovered that the Chinese made figures of cows and other animals and covered them with colorful paper to be used to greet the new year. The Chinese custom was brought to Europe in the 14th Century and was incorporated into the celebration of Lent. When the custom spread to Spain, Spaniards used a clay container referred to as “la olla” which is the Spanish word for pot. Initially, “la olla” was not decorated, but later fringed paper and ribbons were added.
Spanish missionaries brought the concept of a piñata to the Americas as a way to evangelize. Traditionally, the first piñatas in Mexico were shaped like a star with seven points. These points represented the seven deadly sins, the pot represents evil and the candy and prizes inside, the temptation of evil. The person holding the stick is blindfolded in representation of their faith. The breaking of the piñata signifies the reward that a believer enjoys when keeping their faith. In modern times, a piñata is an integral part of Mexican (and other Latin American Countries) birthday celebrations. Many Latinos including my own family brought the tradition to the States and continue to pass it own to their own children.
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Step by step guide to making a homemade piñata.
- Step 1: our kids drew sketches of what they wanted their potential piñatas to look like. They came up with drawing of Thanos (yes, the complicated Marvel character), a Coco inspired guitar, a Mexican man wearing a sombrero and holding a guitar and lastly, a llama. After spending over one and a half weeks working on our piñatas, we were ecstatic that we vetoed the most complicated options, Thanos and the full character Mexican man.
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A post shared by Ruth - Have Kiddos Will Travel (@havekiddoswilltravel) on Sep 26, 2019 at 4:59am PDT
- Step 2: we put to good use the many Amazon shipping boxes that were in our recycling bin and began our piñata by outlining our two shapes and duplicating them. We ended up with two cardboard cutouts of the guitar and two cutouts of the llama. In addition, we included extra space in our outlines to have tabs made out of cardboard that we could hot glue onto a long rectangular piece of cardboard. These pieces were used to hold the two shapes together and form the inside of the piñatas that would be used to hold candy and prizes. It’s best to take a look at the pictures below for a better understanding of this process. The process of outlining, cutting and assembling the two piñatas took a total of 3 days, but we took on this project at the end of each school and work day. You may be able to complete this task much quicker if you’re working on this over the weekend.
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A post shared by Ruth - Have Kiddos Will Travel (@havekiddoswilltravel) on Sep 26, 2019 at 3:26pm PDT
- Step 3: once the hot glue dried, we used school glue to adhere pieces of tissue paper which we had cut into squares. As you can see from the images, we rolled the square piece of tissue paper and used a pencil to glue it to the guitar piñata. It took us about five days to complete this portion of the guitar piñata. The final product came out so much better than we imagined. We cut long strips of tissue paper and created fringes at the end for the decoration for the llama. Pro tip: make sure to leave an unglued flap of cardboard that can be used to insert the candy and small prizes into your finished product.
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A post shared by Ruth - Have Kiddos Will Travel (@havekiddoswilltravel) on Sep 27, 2019 at 4:47am PDT
- Step 4: fill your finished product with candy and prizes and use rope or twine to hang for your fiesta or celebration.
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A post shared by Ruth - Have Kiddos Will Travel (@havekiddoswilltravel) on Oct 2, 2019 at 3:34pm PDT
Pro tips:
- The long fringed papers used on the llama were much easier to complete, those the traditional design of individual pieces of papers on the guitar came up stunning.
- Using a hot glue gun to adhere the cardboard made the final product more stable.
- If you’re using the strip technique start at the bottom of the piñata and work your way up, versus the other way around.
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