Rocketeer Helmet Pinata

Rocketeer Helmet Pinata.

For my friend Pietro’s birthday, he had mentioned that no cool pinatas existed in New Jersey for him to smash. Being born and raised in New Jersey I decided to take that challenge and find a cool pinata. With no such luck in either Party City or Target, I decided to craft a pinata instead, using Pietro’s favorite movie for the subject: The Rocketeer. Obviously.

Papier-mâché pinata base.

With very few supplies at hand I began to make a ghetto pinata. I built a light base out of a gift box and covered that with pieces of wrapping paper coated in Modge Podge. When there was no more box showing and I was at the end of my glue supply I allowed everything to dry. Given more time and supplies, I would have used newspaper in place of wrapping paper and rounded out the pinata a little more. Or used a balloon as a base. Sadly I had none of these things at hand.

Pinata front view.

Once the glue was dry I set to painting over the wrapping paper with shiny gold paint to make the pinata as smooth and pretty as possible. To create the face I cut shapes out of legal paper, colored them in with a thick black marker and then glued them down. The “vents” were made out of pipe cleaners wrapped in tape and then painted over to blend in with the rest of the helmet. I put more black paper on these to mimic the hollow spaces on the real helmet.

Pinata side-view.

It was important to me to add details to make the helmet as accurate as possible. To mimic this I glued pipe cleaners down and painted over them with the gold paint to create a raised texture just like on the Rocketeer helmet. The rounded area near the top was molded out of packing tape which was painted over. The finishing touch was the back ribbon so it could be hung from a tree and beaten to a pulp. Although that has yet to happen and the Rocketeer helmet pinata has instead only been used as Rocketeer candy bowl.