How-to: Create Upcycled Pinwheel Party Decorations

To fold up your pinwheel, you want to fold every other corner of your paper to the center, and pin that in place. Now that you’ve trimmed, you’ve got eight corners to work with, right? So four of those need to fold into the center and get pinned into place.

The problem is, especially when you’re making oversized pinwheels like these, it’s hard to get all of the corners to stay down while you pin. After stabbing our fingers many times, we discovered that you can do this instead:

Grab your first corner, and stick the pin through it. Grab the next corner that needs to fold down, and stick the pin through that. You’ll now have two corners of the paper skewered onto your pin. Continue around, skewering the last two corners that need to fold down, then stick the pin through the center of the wheel. No slipping, no cussing, no stabbed fingers. Yay!

Now, you just very carefully stick the pin into one of the round ends of your cork. The key with getting the pin into the cork without bending it is patience. Just slowly work the pin into the cork.

It’s time to test your pinwheel! Blow on it, and see if it spins. If it doesn’t, pull the pin out ever so slightly and try again. Keep it up until that pinwheel spins easily.