Hi, I’m making a structured pinata for a friends daughter. I need to decorate this cartoon character with long hair but since the head is more spherical; how would I decorate it with long hair. Thank you.
Answer from Piñata Boy
There are a lot of ways you can make hair for a piñata, and the method you choose depends on what effect you’re going for and what the rest of the piñata looks like.
The easiest way to make hair for a piñata is probably using yarn, which can be glued on with ordinary white glue. You could also use something like raffia, possibly spray-painted another color, for stiff or more unkempt hair. For short to medium length hair, you can also use snipped crepe paper. Snipping the crepe paper sideways allows for hair that’s about 1.5 inches long, but you can also make short pieces of crepe paper, say 3 or 4 inches long, and snip them the long way to make hair that’s 2.5 to 3.5 inches long.
When we made large piñatas that requires hair, we used four different techniques for hair: multiple layers of flat crepe paper for Lady Gaga, crinkled gift bag paper for Jimmy Kimmel, Guillermo, and Willie Nelson’s beard, crumpled crepe paper for Lil Wayne’s dreads, and braided crepe paper for Willie Nelson’s braids.
On the Santa Smiley and Neopets Feepit piñatas, we used pillow stuffing from a craft store, pulled apart slightly, and on the Feepit it was also spray-painted. I also used spray-painted pillow stuffing for the purple gas surrounding the Pokémon Gastly piñata. (That piñata hasn’t been added to the website yet, but you can find it on the PiñataBoy Facebook page here.)
Your choice of materials will also depend on what other materials you’re using to decorate the piñata. You’ll want to choose something that is cohesive with the rest of the decorations to avoid an incongruent or “tacked on” appearance for the hair.
If none of these ideas sounds right for your piñata, then do what I do — go walk the aisles at a craft store, or even a hardware store like Home Depot or Lowe’s, and see what jumps out at you. Sometimes the perfect solutions is sitting there right on the shelf.
Good luck!