We are making a wedding cake shapped pinata and were thing it would be fun to have a knife or sword shaped pinata buster. Any suggestions?
Answer from Piñata Boy
I’ve made a lot of piñata sticks intended to look like swords. Here are some of them.
On the Green Dragon piñata I wrapped the stick in aluminum foil hoping to get a really shiny metal blade, but I couldn’t get the foil to lay down down cleanly, so it was all wrinkled and bumpy. I tried to use hot glue to glue it to the stick, and that just made the bumps worse. You can see that in the photos. The hilt on this sword was made from two small paper plates spray-painted gold and placed facing one another. The handle was black electrical tape wrapped around the stick, and I added some wrappings of red yarn at the top and bottom of the handle, along with a red yarn tassel at the bottom. I used the same design with the Smaug piñata a few months later, and there are more photos of the sword piñata stick on that page.
For the Medusa piñata I painted the stick silver and used one paper bowl painted gold as the hilt. I used hot glue to attach the bowl. The handle was wrapped with a black velvety cloth that was also hot-glued on, with a thin red trim spiraling down the handle for decoration. This piñata stick was too long, however — it was almost four feet long, and you can see in the pictures that it broke during the whacking.
The Demon Smiley piñata used a painted stick with a black velvet handle and a gold pommel ball made from Styrofoam. If you spray paint Styrofoam, make sure you paint it with latex paint first, because the solvent in the spray paint will dissolve the Styrofoam.
You’ll see other swords similar to these on the Pirates of the Caribbean piñata, the Warlord of Nibblecheese piñata, and the Princess Ducky piñata. Based on my experiences I prefer to paint the stick silver, use a paper bowl for the hilt, and decorate the handle in some way, with a tassel or a pommel ball or by add a bright color to the black handle, or something like that to give it some flair. You can use wedding colors and adorn your piñata sword with inexpensive wedding-type decorations from a party store to help tie it to the wedding theme.
Good luck!