Confetti is always a fun way to celebrate holidays and special occasions.

Until it is time to clean up.

So, to find a way to incorporate confetti into our New Year’s celebration, I decided upon Confetti Poppers that were designed much like a pull-string pinata.  And, like a pinata, we put them outside.

For the confetti, we used construction paper cut into tiny pieces.  My 3-year-old was very excited about this part.  I did some of the confetti, but it was mostly her job while  I constructed the poppers and her younger sister giggled about the tissue paper.

I’ve seen a few varieties of things like this online, but I chose my materials based off of what I had on hand.

You’ll need:

toilet paper rolls
tissue paper
pipe cleaners
construction paper
ribbon or string
scissors

Cut the construction paper into tiny pieces for the confetti.  Take the pipe cleaners and wrap one end into a kind of ball or loop.  The bigger the loop the better, because the smaller loops I made (like the one pictured below) didn’t break the paper enough for all of the confetti to fall out, and those poppers had to be shaken a little.

Also, if your pipe cleaners are “kid-friendly” like mine were, you’ll need to un-bend the end so that the pointy metal piece is straight, and not tucked over.

Take a piece of colorful tissue paper (ours was used tissue paper from previous birthdays – yes, I’m that person), and wrap it around an empty toilet paper roll, gathering the extra.  With small scissors, poke a teeny, tiny hole in the center of the paper that’s wrapped around the roll – see photo.

After poking the hole, very, very gently push the pipe cleaner through it by inserting it in the top of the toilet paper roll and pushing it through the hole and pulling it all the way down.  If you do this roughly, you’ll rip the paper.  The loop in your pipe cleaner should be resting on the tissue paper covering the bottom of the toilet paper roll.

Pour a handful of confetti into the top of the toilet paper roll and gather the tissue paper together to close it.  Tie a long ribbon or string around the gathered paper.  Use the other end of this string to tie the poppers to something high, or just to hold them over your kids if you don’t have anything to hang them from.

We hung ours outside, mostly so we wouldn’t get confetti all over the house.  Unfortunately, it began to rain just as I tied the last popper on the branch, so we rushed a little more than I expected.  But the poppers achieved their goal:  smiles and giggles.