Make Your Own Memory Piñata

First of all, if you are in full time work be prepared to set aside a good few months of your spare time to complete this project or at least rope in some good natured friends and learn to love rolling paper roses 🌹(Mine took five months, give or take some lapses in enthusiasm!)  !!! We used ours as a wedding guest book, asking friends and family to contribute a memory, message, joke or prediction, and we will break it open on our first anniversary with a bottle of bubbly! 🍾 ( I plan to create a retrospective guest book by sticking the messages into a nice scrapbook with wedding pictures!)

 

Choose a good, round ( or whatever shape you prefer) balloon to start your project. You need one filled with air only, helium will be a nightmare!! I used a foil helium balloon but filled it with air using a straw to blow into the one-way seal. You then need to paper mache several layers of newspaper and PVA around your balloon ( I’d say minimum 5 layers to give it the necessary strength).  Don’t forget to leave a neat square hole at one end to put gifts or memories inside! Once your “shell” is dry and fairly solid, you can burst and remove the balloon.

 

Then comes the real fun!!! Roll tissue paper roses in your choice of colours ( I used our wedding colours) using long strips of 1-2 inch wide tissue paper. Pinch the bottoms and staple them to secure. You can then use a hot glue gun to secure the bottom of the rose to the piñata. If you’re feeling really creative you could do a pattern, or just scatter the colours randomly! You will learn to either love or hate this bit, but if your roses are the same size as mine you will end up with over 1000 to do!!!

Before you finish around the hole at the top, use a sharp implement to put holes in your piñata, you can then use some natural jute string to hang the piñata ( I would recommend playing around with the string to get it to hang nicely and level).

 

Finally (five months later!)  at the bottom of the pinata, you can make a small space among the roses to hang some decorative ribbon  🎀 . You could also add beads or streamers, whatever fits with your theme. Hot glue gun these amongst the roses and then hang up your piñata ready for your event! Voila!