It was time for a summer wreath for my front door. I’d had up a 4th of July wreath and wasn’t quite ready for my Steelers wreath yet, so I decided to make a pinwheel wreath.
Since I had a foam wreath on hand and all you need to make a pinwheel wreath is the wreath form, approximately 15 4×4″ inch squares of paper, and hot glue, this was a super inexpensive wreath to make. Even if you need to buy your supplies, this could easily be made for under $10.
If you don’t have paper on hand that you want to use, I recommend buying scrapbook paper that has two different sides so you don’t have to worry about gluing different paper together. I upcycled paper from two different Lilly Pulitzer catalogs. The front and back inside covers of the catalogs have a gorgeous pattern on them, though I then had to glue solid scrapbook paper to the backs because the backs had patterns I didn’t want in my pinwheel. It was a bit of a pain this way, but I do love the look of this Lilly Pulitzer inspired craft.
It took me about an hour and a half to make this wreath, though part of that time was having to glue the paper together (again: use two sided so you don’t have to worry about this!) and there’s a bit of a learning curve with the pinwheels (plus I had three kids in and out of the room with various requests), so you could probably get this done in less than an hour.
Cut your 4×4″ squares of paper. Don’t worry if they aren’t perfectly square- as long as they are somewhat close, your pinwheels will still look great.
Fold a square in half, corner to corner, creating a triangle.
Unlfold it, then fold it together corner to corner, using the corners you hadn’t before.
When you unfold it, you’ll see an X on your square. These are the lines you’ll use to cut and fold your pinwheel.
Cut down each of the 4 lines towards the middle. Stop about 1/4″ to 1/2″ from the middle.
Now you’re working with 4 triangles. Hot glue one corner of a triangle.
Fold the corner down to the middle of your square and hold until secure.
You’ll fold down and glue every other corner to create your pinwheel. If you want to get fancy, you could glue some sort of decoration to the center of your pinwheel, but I don’t think it really makes a difference unless someone is examining your wreath from less than two inches away.
Next, glue your pinwheels to your wreath form. You’ll have to play with them a little to see how they fit together. If you wrap your wreath form with a pretty ribbon, you could leave a little space between each of the pinwheels. Because I didn’t wrap mine and I didn’t want the white of the wreath form to show through, I placed my pinwheels really close together, overlapping in most places.
