pinwheel love!

The engagement party is less than a week away, and I felt like it still needed something. So, on saturday evening, while I was awake until 3am being completely obsessive with DIY wedding blogs, I came across the adorable idea to use pinwheels at your wedding as decorations/things for your guests to play with. I found the idea/tutorial at Once Wed, and I went to my craft stash to see what I had and what I'd need. To my delight I needed to purchase very little, I only spent a few bucks, and I am more than thrilled with my results!

I needed to cut the 12x12 paper into 6x6 squares, I happened to find a piece of 12x12 that already had 6x6 squares of different designs on it so I took the easy road and used this as my guide for the other 12x12.

The directions on Once Wed suggested using a flower shaped paper punch, but i didn't already own one of those and thought I've gotten this far in my life without one so I didn't want to spend $12 on one now. so I opted for the already cut scrap booking paper flowers, they're incredibly cheap and convenient for this project.

The push pins I was able to find at Michael's were probably my favorite purchase for this project. I love that they have a little gem instead of a pearl as their head.

I added a little something extra to my pinwheels by adding some ribbon to the dowels and I couldn't be more pleased with how they came out!

As I was making them my mom mentioned how much she likes pinwheels, and growing up [there's 6 children in her family and they didn't have a lot of money] every once in a while my grandmother would buy them pinwheels while she was out grocery shopping. I love that these pinwheels for my engagement party conjured memories of my mother's childhood. That's exactly the old-timey feel I was going for!