How to Make a Pinwheel Mobile

Original post by Sarah @ Renewed Upon a Dream, please visit her website for more great ideas!”

Hey everyone!  I wanted to share a project I used as a guest post for Kristina over at ReMade Simple!  I LOVE her blog.  Everything she posts seems to be amazing, and her photography is always wonderful.  If you haven’t seen her stuff, you really need to check it out.  This is a pinwheel mobile that I presented my cousin with a few weeks ago… back when I was in baby project mode because of all the pregnant women around me!

I really wanted to try to make a mobile for her, but I pretty much had no idea what I was doing.  I saw a photo recently of some cute pinwheels propped up in some grass for spring, and I thought they looked so cute & would be lovely hanging as a mobile.  It seemed easy enough to create so I went for it.

The supplies I needed were pretty inexpensive:

• Large embroidery/sewing hoop
• Spray paint
• 4 sheets of double sided scrapbook paper
• Some kind of string or twine, I used stretch magic jewelry string
• Hot glue
• Buttons, pearls or whatever you like to put in the center of each pinwheel (I have pictured pearls, but they didn’t work with my string, so I switched to buttons)
• Tape

To get started on my project, I first spray painted my embroidery hoop.  I wanted it to be white, and I had just bought a regular wooden one at Michael’s.  If you wanted to skip this you could also purchase a colored plastic one if you prefer.

Then I got started on making pinwheels!  I cut my scrapbook paper into 5 inch squares.

I then found the center of each square by measuring 2.5 inches in.  I then cut from each corner, in towards the middle of the paper where I marked.  I tried to cut pretty close to that dot, maybe about a half inch from it.  You want it to be close enough to make a good pinwheel, but not so close that it’s going to rip when you bend the paper over.

Once I had my cuts, I folded one corner of each side towards that dot in the middle and taped them together.  I used two pieces of tape, one on the bottom & one on the top.  I was careful to fold it over in such a way so that it wasn’t creased, but almost, so that it would stay & lay properly.  If you do this it will probably take a little trial & error, it did for me.

I soon had a bunch of pinwheels all over my table.  I went through each of them & cut off the access tape.

Next I punched a whole in the middle of each pinwheel.  I did this with a little hole puncher I had, but you could probably use a sharp needle too if that’s what you have.  I then cut my string.  I cut 8 strings total.  4 were a little bit shorter, and 4 a little bit longer.  On each of them, I strung two pinwheels.  One a little less than halfway from the top, and one at the very bottom.  I secured each pinwheel with a button.

As I made progress with this, I taped completed strings up to my ceiling fan, just to kind of see what they would look like.  It was so fun working with pretty pinwheels above my head!

A couple of days later, once my spray paint was dry, I started attaching my pinwheels to the hoop.  The string that I used is very slippery, so it doesn’t hold a knot very well.  If yours does knot well, you can probably skip most of the hot glue.  I attached the 4 shorter strings of pinwheels directly to the hoop.  Then I attached two strings across the loop, so that they crossed in the middle.  I attached the 4 longer strings of pinwheels to those strings going across the loops.  I guess it’s kind of hard to explain, so here’s a picture, although it’s still hard to see, hopefully this helps.

I hot glued every string at their tie on point for extra reinforcement.  Then I attached a couple pieces of yarn to hang it from, and I was done!

How cute is this!?  I really love it.  I kind of want one in my home & I don’t even have any babies!

Pinwheels are so fun & spring-y!

Have you ever made a mobile before for a baby.  What do you think of making one with pinwheels?

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