Alex’s 5th Birthday
As usual I have totally let my firstborn’s birthday sneak up on me, although I did cut myself a little slack here, what with the meanderings of ‘Freedom Day’ I couldn’t book a venue so we decided ‘Fudge it, we’re going to have it at the park!’. Now Tilgate Park near us is amazing but I wanted to make this birthday a little bit special as his last one was in lockdown so it was a family only affair.
He is currently Godzilla mad and he loved the piñata at a friends birthday (I was less keen on 5 year olds wielding a big stick around with the intention of breaking something…) so I thought how could I combine the two? Well, in my usual ‘take things to extremes’ kind of fashion I decided with less than 2 weeks to go to make a kaiju themed piñata…
Enter Alex’s current favourite bad guy: King Ghidorah. For those of you not familiar with the monsterverse (I thought I was till I came up against my child’s ability to become totally obsessed with a single subject) King Ghidorah is a giant, three headed golden space dragon (yes you read that right).
So, armed with my glue gun, about a tonne of random amazon boxes (lockdown shopping anyone?) and some wonderful granny babysitting I set out to make something that would eventually be demolished in about 30 seconds (did I forget to mention he also has two tails?…).
It was at around this point I realised that this was the first thing I had made since before Ollie was born (about 9 months ago). Having spent the first 2 months of his life back in an MBU (story for another time) I had forgotten how good it felt just to make without a fixed plan, to eyeball a design from a pile of materials, to cut without measuring and to invent as I go along. It really felt like a bit of an awakening. I now have a real drive to get back to my usual making 🙂
Now the heads… For those in the know Ghidorah’s heads are called Ichi, Ni and San, San gets bitten off early in the film and re-grows, this give rise to the ‘Kevin’ memes where Ghidorah’s third head has a very different personality to the other two…
So I decided to try and recreate this feel be making each head slightly different and making San’s (Kevin’s) a little goofy looking…
I am so chuffed with how this turned out! I love working with no particular direction, it means I can go with the flow of the material I am working with. Apart from some minor glue gun burns and very sparkly hands from the spray-paint I am relatively unscathed (which is a miracle considering how long its been since I picked up a scalpel blade).
I was sure I would feel a little pang when Alex and his friends tore him to pieces but there I was cheering him on with gusto. He was so pleased with his piñata and the rest of his monster verse themed party (we did ‘pin the atomic breath on Shin Godzilla’😁) .
Here he is in the Burning Godzilla costume I made for the occasion:
