Gan Gan's 60th birthday

As my sister and I thought about and wrote a menu and food list for the holiday week, we settled on pork taco's (Jamies, obvs!) for the evening of my Dads birthday. Tasty, easy party food. The tacos lent themselves to a Mexican theme. Cue a bottle of tequila, some Mexican hats, mariachi music, mahoosive moustaches... and pinatas.

Who wants to buy a pinata (Actually, half way through this process, when every surface in my kitchen was covered in dripping paper mache, I must confess, I did wonder at my sanity and at how spending £5 on a paper donkey would have been perhaps prudent..!) - in true Christie style, we got our craft on. The Kidlets LOVED it. Apparently there is nothing better than paper mache mush!

We followed the basics of these video instructions from youtube:

and got cracking!

 

They needed a second coat, but over the course of a weekend, we got some pretty sturdy looking pinatas done!

We waited to decorate them once we arrived on holiday, to ensure perfect transportation (despite their sturdy look, and given it was our first attempt at paper mache, I wasn't sure how strong they would actually be and so we saved popping the internal balloons to keep structural integrity intact)

My sister totally got on board with decorating them, and I really enjoyed the second stage!
I think we did a pretty good job!

It will be hard to see them smashed apart for the prizes inside - we thought we would take bets on whose is the strongest (Paul thinks his will be, and he may be right, he was not frugal with my paper mache!).

On reflection, despite the gloopy clearing up, we'd never have been able to buy these. Lochie loved researching and planning the whole process on the internet, they all loved the activity and they were were proud to have made something that was such a big part of Gan Gan's birthday party - the sweets and prizes weren't too shabby either!

The day of Gan Gans birthday dawned and we set to re-creating Mexico in a converted barn in Devon... This is how it went...

 

 

We had a glorious day with mariachi festival music and much laughter, I hope that my Dad enjoyed it as much as we did - I think he did!

Today is our last day of holiday, and tomorrow we return home and to reality.
Thanks for reading x x