Michele

Had lots of fun planning this last minute trip to Washington. We decided to drive so we could bring June and the pinata I made. Yes, I made a freaking pinata! It was really fun to make and a lot of guess work. I used dollar store streamers, school glue, poster board, newspaper and masking tape.  First I had to figure out what shape to make and decided on a pirate ship. I looked at several different pirate ships as reference then drew a ship on poster board and cut out two pieces. I then joined the pieces together with masking tape and more poster board. Then with glue and some water I put a layer of newspaper around it. It took several days, letting one layer dry at a time. I think I did about five layers. I wanted it strong the hold all the candy I was planning on packing in it.

I wish I took more pictures of the process. The most time consuming and fun part was adding the crepe paper. I got all the color from the dollar store and Walmart. I used hot glue to put the crepe paper on. I was very happy with the results! I made a big opening for the candies and I used felt for the sails. I hot glued them on as well.

The pinata was wonderful! And in the end, after stuffing it with candy coins and rubber duckys we decided not to break it.

Keeping with the pirate theme, I tried to make a treasure chest cake. It was really fun trying to put it together, but I should have giving myself more time. I used 2 bread loaf pans I got from the dollar store with one with a little less batter to make the top. Once I got the cakes together I couldn’t figure out a good way to keep it open. I didn’t want to used a bunch of food color either. So it kind of looked like a treasure chest cake, but the colors made it look like a football cake, which was perfect because the next day was the Super Bowl. I also made cupcakes with little golden coins on top. If that wasn’t enough sugar, made pirate cookies using a pumpkin cookie cutter. I just used a basic sugar cookie recipe and vanilla almond frosting. Everyone loved them.

For the sand I used crumbed up sandies and I got delightful chocolate shells from Winco. I should have gotten the candy coins from Winco too. They have all sorts of candies in the bulk section. The funnest part of the pirate party was the green screen. We couldn’t find any cheap software to change the background, but it wasn’t too difficult to use Gimp to fix the pictures up. Here are some of the cute pictures we took.

We got bulk fabric from Joann’s and cut bananas out of them and made long gold sashes. I made a hook out of a paper cup and painted cardboard. The knives and sword were made out of cardboard and painted too. Pretty easy and really fun. The background images we found on google. The program we used to edit the pictures is a free program that can be downloaded from Gimp.org.  There are lots of tutorials on YouTube about Gimp. Photoshop works too.

I can’t wait to have another party!