How to Make a Pinata Shaped Like a Pufferfish

Disclaimer: This page may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!

“Tell me about pufferfish,” my almost three year old daughter said over and over again for several days. Her short lived pufferfish obsession started one night in the bath. She was playing with a pufferfish squirter toy. It was not a new toy, but for some reason that night she asked what it was. And then decided they were the most interesting thing ever. The following day, we took a special trip to the library to check out every single pufferfish book. So, I knew I needed to figure out how to make a pinata shaped like a pufferfish when my daughter decided she wanted an under the sea themed birthday party.

Doing a homemade pinata did worry me. I worried it would break after one swing or not at all. I worried that it would be too heavy to hang. And I was super worried that my daughter was going to get upset when it broke. Thankfully, it all went really well. Every kid took two turns hitting it before the older kids broke it open the rest of the way. Eventually, the holes I hung it from did rip through, but it wasn’t a big deal to tie the rope fully around the pinata. And a reminder that candy was coming cheered my daughter up the one time she started to get sad about her pufferfish getting hit.

So, don’t let any concerns stop you from making your own homemade pinata. My below steps show how to make a pufferfish pinata, but you can learn a lot about making pinatas in general too.

How to Make a Pinata:

Materials:

• Balloon
• Newspaper
• Flour
• Cardboard
• X-ACTO knife
• Paper clips
• Paint
• Sequin sparkle purple tissue paper
• Hot glue
• Rope (I used paracord)
• Plastic bat

Creating the Pufferfish Pinata Structure:

To start, I made the sphere structure for the body. It obviously needed to be hollow in order to hold candy. This was as easy as blowing up a balloon. I taped it to make it more round.

Then, I mixed up my paper mache. I used the same 1 part flour and 2 parts water paper mache recipe that I used for my son’s birthday sword in the stone decoration. I also tore a whole bunch of newspaper into strips. Apparently, tearing helps hide the seams better than cutting.

After I finished prepping, I put on my first complete layer of paper mache. Just like the last time we used paper mache, my daughter refused to help. She doesn’t like the feel of the paste.

Then, I put it out in the sun to dry. Do NOT do this. The heat caused my balloon to expand and rip a hole in the newspaper. So, I patched my hole and….yes I put it back outside to dry. I figured it had expanded as much as it would. Well it hadn’t and my balloon popped. So now I had a soggy but sorta firm deflated paper mache mess. Instead of starting over, I cut a hole in the worst side and blew up a new balloon inside. And then I didn’t try to “speed up” the drying process again.

I put on lots and lots of layers until I was confident it was sturdy enough to pop the balloon inside. Thankfully, I had no more disasters and once the balloon popped, my hollow sphere stayed intact.

Creating the Pufferfish Pinata Shape:

Next, I added all the pieces to actually make my pinata look like a pufferfish. To do this, I cut out a tail, fins, eyes, and a mouth out of cardboard. Then, I taped these pieces onto the pinata.

After even more paper mache, all my cardboard pieces were delicately attached. I liked the look of it, so I did several more layers to completely cover the new additions.

At this point, I used a X-ACTO knife to cut a hole in the top of the pufferfish. Then, my daughter systematically checked each piece of candy and dropped it into the hole. Once it was all filled up, I used more paper mache to glue back on the piece I had cut out. I also did one last layer to make sure everything looked smooth and that it would hold up to little kids with bats.

Once the final layer dried, I made a place for it to hang from. To do this, I cut four holes into the top of the pinata. I then fed two big unwound paper clips through the holes. I left it like this for now to make painting in the next step easier.

Decorating the Pufferfish Pinata:

Now it was time to decorate. The first step was to paint. My daughter loves painting, so she happily helped with this. We painted the main body purple and the tummy white. I didn’t have quite enough paint for the fins so I ended up doing two different shades of purple on them. Once we finished painting the body, I wound my paper clips together to create loops I could hang the pinata from.

The last step was the trademark pufferfish quills. I contemplated how to do these for a while. I didn’t want them to be hard and sharp in case they went flying and hit someone. So, what I ended up doing was twirling sequin sparkle purple tissue paper around a cone shaped piece of paper. Then, I used a paintbrush to apply paper mache glue all over it. This made it keep its shape, but it didn’t make it hard.

Lastly, I glued each quill onto the pufferfish’s back with hot glue.

We hung the pufferfish pinata up once the kid’s arrived at the party and were ready to play. I used paracord to hang it from our swing set. We gave the kids a plastic bat to hit it with and blindfolded the older kids. I gave the kids labeled bags to put their candy in once it broke open.

Outcome of How to Make a Pinata Shaped Like a Pufferfish:

I love that this pinata pufferfish worked. It looked just how I pictured and the kids had so much fun breaking it open. I think fun shaped homemade pinatas are going to be a new party tradition for my family. If you could make any shaped pinata, what would it be?