How to make paper pinwheels

As part of our wedding reception decor, I thought it would be fun to make pinwheels. Originally I thought I might carry a pinwheel instead of a bouquet of flowers, but in the end decided to carry nothing at all. But the pinwheel idea stuck with me, so we made several to use in our photo booth, professional photos, and as decorations around the yard.

We made our pinwheels following this tutorial, and they were très easy. First, we bought supplies: square paper in pretty patterns (I believe these are for scrapbooking), wooden dowels, beads, pushpins and spray adhesive. The paper seconded as part of the centerpieces at our FMGSS a couple months ago – we just held onto it and used it for this project, too.

I didn’t do a very good job of documenting the process, but it’s pretty simple. Especially when you have help!

I wanted something interesting on both sides of the pinwheels, so we glued two sheets of paper together, back to back, using spray adhesive. After they dried, we used a ruler and a precision craft cutter to make the cuts indicated in the tutorial. Then we folded the corners in and pinned them in place with a pushpin. We bought large-sized pins, hoping the pointy part would be long enough to go through a bead (so they’d spin) and the dowel. That didn’t really work – we had to skip the beads so they didn’t spin, which ended up being fine – but I really liked the look of the over-sized pins.

We stuck the pin through the dowel so the whole pinwheel was pinned together, but unfortunately I think our dowels were a little too flimsy. Some of them cracked where the pin pushed through. We simply used packaging tape on the backside of the pinwheel to ensure that the dowel stayed in place. From the front, they looked great, and they really held up throughout the party!

I haven’t uploaded them yet, but later you’ll see these come up a lot in the photo booth pictures!