This piñata was made per special request for a friends sons birthday. He asked for a R2-D2 piñata, and that is what he got! Let me first say that I don’t measure for these and things never turn out quite straight or even. I figure the kids are going to destroy it anyway, so the effort to get it perfect would be kind of a waste, right?

To start with, you just take a wide piece of cardboard and roll it up like a roll of toilet paper and hot glue the ends together. You also have to cut out a circle of the same size to close The bottom of the piñata. I made mine a little shorter after I rolled it because R2 was a little too tall at first. I cut the top half of the cylinder into little triangles that I could then be able to fold into his head shape. This is where measuring wood make it look prettier, but I just filled in the biggest holes with scrap pieces of cardboard. It’s going to be covered with crêpe paper later anyway so need to make it look pretty.

Next it was time to draw and cut out the shapes for his two arms and hot glue them together. Ignore the really dirty hot glue gun, it has seen a lot of crafts.

I spent some time thinking about how to attach the arms, since I sort of wanted him to be able to stand on them. Just hot gluing them to the side wouldn’t have worked. A good solution was to cut a hole on his arm and a hole on his side his side and make a “rod” out of rolled up cardboard with lots of glue and slide into both holes. It’s a little awkward to describe, you can probably see it better in the pictures below. But before you do this, make sure you have him covered in the white crêpe paper already. It’s much easier to do before you attach the arms.

Then it was time to put in the string for the piñata to hang on. I cut a good size hole and made a sort of anchor so the string did not simply tear out of the top of the cardboard. I also put several layers of cardboard on the top on the inside so that the piñata would not tear once it was filled with candy. To make the hole for the string I just used my X-Acto knife blade and then make the hole bigger with a pen or a pencil. You can use a paper Clip if your string gives you a hard time going through the small opening.

After that, it’s ready to be filled with whatever candy you can imagine. Then seal the hole and finish putting on the crêpe paper on the outside.

From here, you can decide how much or little you want to decorate him. Since it was for a friend I probably made extra effort to make it look nice. And we were really happy with how it turned out. Her son actually kept the piñata afterwards for a while (which made me feel really good). Here is the finished product!