Pinwheels, Part 1

Believe it or not, TD and I talked about pinwheel decorations as soon as we found our lovely park site for our wedding. I immediately thought about using origami paper because I love the colors and Japanese floral patterns. As I started doing some wedding inspiration research, I came across two gorgeous weddings on the fabulously funky Green Wedding Shoes. First, this highly stylized wedding with an awesome explosion of pinwheels and color:

Don't you love the texture of all those pinwheels on the wedding arch? Then there's this much more natural and easy-breezy, east coast wedding:

I didn't really need to be sold on pinwheels, but it was fun to see it applied in different ways. In terms of making pinwheels, I turned to the one... the only... Martha Stewart. I modified (err, simplified) her instructions, but they are a great baseline.

I ordered wooden dowels and map pins from Blick art and used artist tape to wrap the dowel "stems", but in retrospect spray-painting probably would have been better, although messier. Martha's two-sided pinwheels look absolutely delicious, but to keep it simple (I was delegating some of the labor), I just used one sheet of origami paper.

After finding the center (easier to see your pencil marks on the plain white side), cut out to the corners, leaving a radius of an inch or so uncut around the center.

Of the eight "corners" fold in every other one to the center until it looks like a pinwheel. Let the points overlap the center dot by half an inch or so. Then pierce the map pin through center and into the dowel. Push that map pin in as far as it will go, but it probably not go in all the way, which is good because that allows the pinwheel to move.

With some help from a couple (champagne and cupcake fueled) worker bee friends, we made a good pile of pinwheels to decorate with!

Photo credit: Beckie W

BONUS: the pinwheels ACTUALLY SPUN! I really wasn't expecting that, but it was so cool to look down the aisle and pathways of pinwheels and seeing every couple spinning furiously in the breeze:

Photo credit: Mike H

I have more to say on pinwheels and some specific projects I did with them, but we'll save that for another post...