Capital B: DIY Pinatas for any Party or Gathering!

Today I am posting as part of McKenzie from Girl Loves Glam's Summer Fun Series-

I've tried to come up with a really fun, and simple, idea-

I hope this will be something you can

enjoy and really use this summer!

I've made homemade pinatas for birthdays twice now and I love this particular method. These babies are tough! And that makes it super fun- the kids can really put some effort into trying to break them, everyone gets a great turn, and then even at that, the adults get to participate too! I'm going to be making these again later this summer for our family camping trip with Stephen's family- watching his brothers try to break one of these will be a riot!

Really, you can determine for yourself how tough you want your pinata to be. These are made out of paper grocery bags. If you want your kids themselves to be able to crack it open, use only one bag. If you want three grown men to all be able to try their hand, use more like five or six :)

So next time your at the grocery store, choose paper over plastic and then stockpile the bags for a few trips worth. I let the boys decorate their own pinatas- I loved these fun little smelly paints- aren't the faces fun?!

Ryder might have thought the paint bottles needed to become rocket boosters

for his toy dune buggy... rubber bands make anything possible around here :)

We rarely break out the glitter around here... not because of the mess- I don't actually care too much about that part- but because... let's face it, boys don't always go for glitter first choice. They were thrilled to use it for these though! Maybe a titch too thrilled....

18 or so hours to dry... sahweet! :)

Once you have your outer bag decorated, stack as many as you want together- they fit inside each other without really any headache at all. Then add your candy... I might have actually forgotten this stage and had to crack one of ours back open :P

Then take your top edges, fold them all down together once and then twice. I then used Duck Tape to seal that fold... the stuff is tough and only adds to the strength of the whole thing. Plus, if you have a lot of bags all stacked together, it makes it lots easier to work with them all at once.

Then you'll grab a hole punch and punch a few holes (not more than four I'd say) along that top area. See my holes in the top left pic below:

Next grab some ribbon- either the fabric kind or more plastic party kind- and string it through your holes. I don't have any "best" way to tell you to do this- each one I've ever strung has been different. I'd just recommend trying to loop your ribbon through your holes more than once. I used the tip of a steak knife to kinda drill out my holes a bit and make them just a titch bigger so I could make this work. Lastly, tie the two ribbon ends together at the top to create a hanger. I might've been doing this with two impatient little dudes in the background... They were in it for the candy. Well, and maybe the acceptable violence part too... :)

So here's our first round of finished pinatas! I also used some smaller lunch sack bags to create each of the boys a mini one just for them- I love how cute these small ones seem to turn out. For our second round of making them I added some long strips of crepe paper and tulle to create a flowing look- this gets looking pretty wild as it's being beaten up- adds to the drama! My favorite was probably the one on the right here:

I wrapped it loosely in crepe paper and then used cute washi tape to secure random areas all around the bag. This one I was able to decorate after the candy was added and the closure/ hanger already done- very fast, but totally cute!

Anyhow, so once you're pinata itself is complete, you're ready to hang! We don't have any big trees around our house at all- such a bummer! So I removed the swings from our swingset and hung the pinatas from it- worked great :) A driveway basketball hoop could work great too. If you do have good tree branches, you may not need to use an extra piece of ribbon to attach your pinata by the hanger... but if not, here's how... again, no method to it, I just tried to make sure it seemed secure:

And finally they could get out some crazy energy by banging on their cutie pinatas!

Being allowed to connect the bat with something (with all their might at that!) =

coolest afternoon activity ever!

First they both attacked the larger one we made and then a couple days later we tried out these cute smaller ones with really the very same effect as the larger one- they are stinkin' tough too! These below had three bags stacked together and I had to give them some really hard hits to get them to bust open!

After quite a lot of hits, this was the result... and this was only one bag, no stacking at all. In all of these I've ever made, they have finally broken at the top portion where the hanger is attached... but even that doesn't come easy! For a tiny kid who doesn't want it to be so hard, try just one of the small lunch bags- I'd think that would be only just strong enough! :)

Woo hoo for the prize inside! And the awesome happy faces that come with getting to it :)

The end fate of our homemade pinata... but not until after they had gotten their fill! No crying over shortened or missed turns, no frustration over being asked to "take it easy"... this pinata is for real ;)

Oh, and I guess I'm now using hashtags to label my own photos inside my blog posts...