This monster piñata was over 4 1/2 feet tall and had a 7 foot wingspan!

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 breakable by a bunch of 11-year-old girls.

The big-headed design is also top-heavy, so correct placement of 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 to make the gigantic wings hold their shape and not fall off or collapse under their own weight.

What's a shoyru?

This is a shoyru.

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



The Disco Feepit piñata is another Neopets creature.

This was the first really heavy piñata I ever made.

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 about a quarter inch thick -- way too thick for the kids to ever beable to break through.

I weakened the walls by stabbing them repeatedly with a knife.  These perforations left the piñata structurally sound enough to support its weight, but softened the walls against the blows and created vulnerable weak spot throughout the pinata that the kids could prey upon.

I hoped that these weak spots would tear open, then the holes would widen, and then the whole thing would come apart.  That's pretty much how it worked out.

I solved the wing problem by wandering the aisles at Home Depot.  Eventually I came upon heavy gauge wire, specifically 3/16" copper wire.  It was malleable enough to bend into shape, but heavy enough to hold its shape even with the wing material attached to it.  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.