april's craft nest: cowboy party ~ horse piñata

My 3 year old's cowboy/wild west party is coming up next week so last week, pretty much every evening after work and after the almost-3-year -old was in bed, I worked on this:

I used Oh Happy Day's technique to cut out the shape and tape it all together.

The Safeway produce man helped out by giving me a few apple boxes to cut up. It had a few "air holes" but they were easy enough to cut around.

I free-handed the horse shape and cut it out with a combination of scissors and box cutter.

photo courtesy of 3 year old photographer who kept busy taking photos so mama could draw and cut out the horse.

Cut out 2 of the same shape.

I then used a cereal box (not shown) cut in in 3 or 4 inch strips to bend around the horse's shape and duct taped it all together. The cereal boxes are much more pliable than big cardboard boxes and worked well to go around the bends.

Here is the almost-birthday boy (who refused to put his shirt back on) with the piñata to show the scale. He wanted to ride it!

Heading into the "the barn"

Then came the looong part. I cut folded strips of tissue paper (of varying sizes) and then fringed them while they were still folded. Then unfolded them and hot glued them to the piñata, starting at the hooves and working my way up to the top.

For the sides (where the cereal box was taped on) I just glued on the tissue paper in a strip and didn't worry about fringing it.

For the tail I just cut strips of yarn and tied them together and hot glued them on. The mane is self-explanatory.