I’m was just wondering how you made the zebra neck. Like do I need to use a balloon or cardboard. It’s amazing how you made the zebra! I really love it ^_^
Answer from Piñata Boy
The zebra’s neck was roughly cone-shaped, so I wanted to make a papier mâché cone. I had a laminated wall map of the world in my garage (about 3′ x 4′ in size), so I rolled it into a cone shaped and taped it to hold the cone in place. I propped the cone up from underneath so that it would not collapse, then taped newspaper over the cone and applied a few layers of papier mâché over the newspaper. Once it was dry, the papier mâché lifted cleanly off the laminated map, so the map was still as good as new and I had a flexible papier mâché cone that I could cut and shape to fit onto the zebra’s shoulders and head.
You can probably accomplish the same thing more quickly using thin cardboard, but when I made the zebra I wasn’t yet using thin cardboard for piñatas. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had shaped the legs from thin cardboard, because they had to support the weight of the filled piñata, and I made them the hard way using balloons and papier mâché. If I had it to do all over again, I would use thin cardboard for the legs, but I might still use the map to make a neck cone, because the papier mâché neck was pretty easy to make and pretty easy to fit onto the zebra.
You can see details of how I made the rainbow zebra piñata on the Make a Zebra page.