How to Make a Doctor Who Dalek Pinata

Make a Dalek pinata for a Doctor Who birthday party using a ready-made round pinata, cardboard, crepe paper, some Easter eggs, and a plunger.

I don't like sympathetic pinatas very much.  At the best, it seems a little sad to be brutalizing a beloved character.  At worst...well...just take a look.

I prefer to make it something either entirely neutral, or a worthy adversary.  Like a Dalek.  I had no qualms about letting children beat a Dalek to death.

I usually do my own papier mache using a balloon for my pinatas, and that would have totally worked here.  I just ran out of time.  So I went to my local Party City and bought a perfectly round baseball pinata to use as the top/head of my Dalek pinata.

I used simple corrugated cardboard and packing tape to create the rest of the shape for the body.

I scored a rectangle of cardboard every couple inches (only half-way through the cardboard, so it would bend nicely, but not cut entirely through) and bent it around the mid-section of the baseball pinata.  I secured it with packing tape.

I cut the base out of the same cardboard--kind of an angular teardrop shape.  Rounded at the back, coming to a point at the front.  More packing tape attached the base to the back of the Dalek that I'd attached to the baseball pinata.

Each angular front section then got its own panel of cardboard, and was taped to the base and the baseball pinata head.

Once the panels were all attached, I cut an X in the cardboard with my X-acto knife and insterted a plunger through the pinata so that it just protruded out the back.  A clean, new, never-used plunger, thank you very much.  I bought it at the dollar store for 99 cents.  

More packing tape was used to secure the plunger in place.

At this point, it was time to make the Dalek pretty.  Well, as pretty as a Dalek is going to get, I suppose.  Niamh helped my shop for the materials, and requested a hot pink Dalek.  Why not?  If they'd had hot pink Daleks, then in the episode Asylum of the Daleks, when Rory asks "what color?" there would have been an interesting answer.  Plus, Niamh is a 6 year old girl.  A six year old girl who asked for a weeping angels birthday party, granted, but still a little girl.  She likes her creepy with a good dose of hot pink and sparkles, thank you very much.

I put Niamh in charge of cutting the crepe paper into fringe, and I have to say, she did an awesome job.  It was truly helpful, and she loved being part of the party-planning process.  I glued her crepe paper fringe in overlapping layers to the cardboard Dalek form.  I added some of the knobs by gluing old purple plastic Easter eggs to the crepe-paper-covered pinata.  Sadly, I didn't have enough to go all the way around, but it was enough to give a good effect.

It was tough to exterminate that Dalek pinata, but the kids eventually persevered, and retrieved their reward of jammy dodgers and jelly babies.  And using my brilliant pinata tip, everyone went home happy and with ample bounty.

Dalek exterminated, mission complete.