Laura Vegas

Once a month, on the Creating Keepsakes blog, there is a Trends Talk feature, with one of the Dream Team members. This month, it's my turn, and I choose to talk about accordian pinwheels.

I've been spotting these fun accordian pinwheels all over the place. And just recently I finally started to incorporate them into my layouts. But there are so many other fun things to do with them, and you can see lots of examples in my blog post HERE.

For those of you that might be new to making these fun pinwheels, I put together a quick and simple tutorial:

You can totally make these without a scoring board. But having one will definately make it easier. Mine is from Stampin Up, but there are a few other brands out there as well. I cut 12 inch strips of patterned paper to make the flowers. I varied the widths of my strips, from 1.25 inches to 2 inches wide. I found that this size works best on my layouts.

I used a border punch along one side of the paper strip, just to give the edge a bit of interest. If you do this, you'll just want to be sure that the punched edge ends up on the outside of the flower.

The scoring board makes it so easy to score the lines along the strip of paper. I made my score marks every quarter of an inch.

I scored along the backside of my paper, since it was easier to see than on the black side. Look at those perfectly lined up score lines, all ready for folding.

Next, you're going to accordian fold the paper strip. Folding it over one way, and then the other way. Back and forth. If you don't have a scoring board, you can start at this point, and just do the accordian folding on your own, without score marks. The folds don't have to be perfect and straight, so don't stress over it if you aren't able to score your paper.

You would continue to fold all the way down the strip of the paper.

Next, you want to adhered the two ends together, using a strong adhesive that is really going to hold. I use glue dots, which hold pretty well. You can even staple the ends, if you're not super picky about the staples showing a little bit.

You're going to want something to adhere the flower too, once you get it into the right shape. I use a circle punch on a scrap of cardstock, and then put some strong adhesive on it. I just happened to have these jumbo sized glue dots, which worked really well.

This is where you have to show your folded paper strip who's boss. Start with it standing up, as pictured above. You'll want to kind of bunch up the edges on the top, and start pushing them down in the center.

As you push down the center, the outer edges will start to flatten out

And poof, you'll have a flower. But hold onto it, or poof, it will pop right back up and you'll be right back where you started 😉

You will need to carefully move it over, onto your punched circle with adhesive. It doesn't exactly go on there neatly, so just play with it, and squeeze the center edges together and push down to secure.

Then you can add some fun embellishments to the center of your flower to finish them off.

For the flowers on my layout, I added die cut cardstock flowers that I had left over from another project. And then a threaded button to finish it off.